Blume is a data scientist, administrator, and biostatistician, with vast experience building and leading academic programs. Most recently, Blume served as Director of Graduate Education at Vanderbilt’s Data Science Institute and Vice-Chair of Education in the Department of Biostatistics and was a tenured Professor of Biostatistics, with secondary appointments in Biomedical Informatics and Biochemistry at Vanderbilt. Throughout his career, he proposed and established the M.S. in Data Science at Vanderbilt University and established the Master of Public Health program at Brown University.

Blume’s areas of research and collaboration include radiology, cancer diagnosis and prediction, nephrology, translational biomedicine, fMRI, and women’s health. His published research is on a wide variety of topics, including evidential philosophy of statistical inference, likelihood methods, second-generation p-values, prediction modeling, mediation modeling, ROC curves, sequential testing, trial design, empirical Bayes methods for biomedical data, false discovery rates, model selection, and neuroimaging.