DEATH / LODGE NOTICES ROHDE, Charles August
Charles “Chuck” Rohde, of Timonium, Maryland, and PhD, professor and chair emeritus in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, passed on January 23, 2023 at age 85. He will be building in perpetuity brilliant statistical models in his afterlife.
Chuck was born on April 7, 1937 in Baltimore to the late Clarence and Isabel Rohde, schoolteachers who also cultivated a three-acre peach and apple orchard in Timonium. From a young age, two things were apparent: Chuck was intellectually gifted, and he was an exceptional athlete. He graduated from Hereford High School in 1955 and was later inducted into the Hereford High Hall of Fame as a leading varsity basketball scorer with 314 points, a record he set during the 1954-55 season. He learned to fish in his youth and could often be found casting along the Jones Falls. He also spent his high school years honing his golf game and caddying at Baltimore Country Club, a sport that took him well into his eighties, where he would quietly celebrate “shooting his age” on a regular basis.
Chuck earned a BS in Management Science from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve) in Cleveland, Ohio in 1959 and his PhD in Statistics from North Carolina State University in Raleigh in 1964. He was invited by Johns Hopkins to join the School of Public Health as a postdoctoral fellow in Biostatistics, was appointed assistant professor the following year and devoted a storied fifty-plus-year career to Hopkins and the field of biostatistics. Chuck’s contributions as an admired professor, researcher, department chair, author and advisor to five decades of students are extraordinary. He is credited with playing a major role in shaping the Biostatistics department and programming at Hopkins, as well as influencing the successful careers of many who studied public health and biostatistics under his tutelage. While he was department chair from 1981 to 1996, the Biostatistics program rose to national and international prominence, a position still enjoyed by the University today. Chuck’s research focused on generalized linear models and likelihood theory and analysis. His textbook, Introductory Statistical Inference with the Likelihood Function, remains an actively sought-after resource. He is also known for his work in helping to eliminate racial health disparities and is credited with a technique for assessing lead content in paint dust in urban homes.
Chuck and his wife Savilla married in 1981. Chuck was frequently invited to teach at universities around the world, which took him and his wife for extended stays in Yerevan, Armenia, Changchun, China, Helsinki, Finland and Padua, Italy. His favorite place on Earth was the French countryside. Chuck was a prominent figure in his stepson Brooks’ life, extolling the virtues of fine wine, golf, Tar Heels basketball and Michelin-starred restaurants. He also enjoyed sitting in his back yard deliberating over domestic and foreign affairs with anyone audacious enough to engage.
Chuck taught his grandson how to fish and had countless conversations with him about the joys of math. He made sure his granddaughter knew that some of his most impressive mentees and advisees over the years at Hopkins were women who went on to do remarkable things.
Chuck is survived by his wife Savilla Rohde, younger brother John Rohde and family, and stepson Brooks Kitchel and family.