Chirayath Madhavan Suchindran, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biostatistics at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the initial Fellows of the Carolina Population Center (CPC), passed away on March 25, 2023, after a distinguished career in demography and statistics. Consistent with his modesty despite his great contributions to his profession and to human knowledge, he preferred to just be called Suchi.
Suchi was a mathematical demographer and biostatistician in the statistical services core of the CPC for four decades, developing state-of-the-art methods for demographic analysis and statistical approaches for addressing substantive issues. His contributions were instrumental to CPC’s successful applications for funding for many grants and contracts. This included his role as co-investigator and lead survey statistician on the Add Health (National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, funded by NICHD (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) contracts for over 30 years and continuing), advising thousands of users of Add Health on how to analyze the data, including accounting for its complex sample design. The statistical services core of CPC has been repeatedly recognized as a key component of CPC’s successful proposals to NICHD for funding its Center Grants and Training Grants, and to other NIH centers for research funds. Suchi was a life-long collaborator of J. Richard Udry, the longest-serving CPC Director and the first Add Health Director, as well as Carolyn Halpern, Chair of the Maternal and Child Health Department.
Suchi was born, raised and educated in Kerala, India, earning his first two degrees, a BSc in Mathematics and MSc in Statistics, at the University of Kerala. In 1967, Moye Freymann (later the founder of CPC and first Director) and Bradley Wells (UNC Biostatistics professor working with the Ford Foundation), discovered Suchi in India and invited him to go to UNC to study for a PhD in Biostatistics, with a Ford Foundation fellowship. Suchi a PhD in 1972. He studied with Mindel Sheps, famous for mathematical modeling of human fecundity and fertility, becoming her protegee, inheriting her notes and papers, and teaching her advanced mathematical demography course after her passing, becoming himself one of the prominent statistical demographers of the last half century. His special relationship with Professor Sheps was recognized on the occasion of the celebration of the publication of her book, Mathematical Models of Conception and Birth (Sheps & Jane Menken) in 1973, just after her death.
As for his Suchi’s contributions to the Biostatistics department, from 1972-2008 Biostatistics had its own (apart from CPC) unique NICHD-funded training program (T32-HD07237), “Research Training in Population Statistics,” for which Suchi was director nearly the entire time; it provided full funding for several pre-and post-doctoral graduate fellowships every year. For over 40 years, Suchi taught up to three levels of increasingly sophisticated courses in demographic methods (1-2 courses/year, co-teaching the basic course over the last 20 years with Richard Bilsborrow). He was known to be incredibly generous with his time with not only his own doctoral students and advisees but also dozens of other biostatistics and CPC students, whenever they sought help. He carried out collaborative research with students and faculty in Biostatistics as well as throughout the School of Public Health , the School of Medicine, and various social sciences, and in India and elsewhere around the world. He collaborated extensively with RTI International on many projects, including consequences of adolescent pregnancy, end of childbearing, childlessness, infant mortality in North Carolina, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on patterns of reproduction and mortality risk, and with a number of other NIH institutes in Washington, DC.
Suchi made major contributions to many significant research projects at CPC and across the university in addition to Add Health, including Measure and Evaluation (USAID), studies of obesity, HIV, heart, and other medical conditions; analyses of family violence, cash transfers in South Africa, PTSD, evaluation of family planning programs, old age mortality, birth intervals and fecundity, multilevel analysis of fertility and migration. Beyond the University, Suchi contributed generously to professional associations and journals. He was deputy editor of Demography early in his career (1974-77), Associate Editor of the new journal Mathematical Population Studies from its founding in 1986 to 2005, and also associate editor of Survey Methodology for Statistics Canada. He was also a member of the editorial boards of other journals, and a reviewer of technical papers for dozens of additional journals. He was a founding member of and President of the Triangle Area Population Society. He served many times on Scientific Review Committees evaluating research, program and center grant proposals for NICHD, and also reviewed proposals for NSF, the National Institute of Aging, etc., and was an external examiner for doctoral dissertations for several universities in India. Finally, he was active in organizing and chairing sessions and presenting papers at PAA, the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute throughout his career.
Suchi was co-author with Krishnan Namboodiri of the major book on life tables, Life Table Techniques and Their Applications, Academic Press (1987), used widely to teach advanced skills in life tables. He authored the chapter on model life tables in the major graduate level textbook in demography, The Methods and Materials of Demography (Siegel and Swanson, eds., 2004). He is recognized as having made important contributions in biological models of fecundity and fertility, analysis of birth interval data, frailty survival models, estimation of statistical power and design effects from complex sample survey designs, analysis of contraceptive use dynamics, and a host of statistical models of medical issues, as indicated in the titles of the journals in which his over 220 journal articles and book chapters appear. These range from statistical to population journals and journals in public health and medicine, including, for example: JASA, Biometrics, Communications in Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society; Demography, Population Studies, Journal of Marriage and Family, International Perspectives in Family Planning; JAMA, Circulation, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, American Journal of Public Health, Epidemiology, American Journal of Epidemiology, Statistics in Medicine, Dermatology, and Research on Aging.
Dr. Suchindran was elected to the Indian Society for Medical Statistics in 1993, honoring him for his research on medical issues; and for his significant lifetime contributions to demography, he was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1995.