Our new PhD students – Fall 2024
We are delighted to welcome five new students to our doctoral program this fall.
Kun Bai is a new student in our PhD program, but he is not new to our department, having worked as a staff biostatistician since 2022. Bai earned his MS in biostatistics at the University of Michigan with a health data science concentration, and he has co-authored peer-reviewed papers in European Journal of Cancer, Shock, Cancers (Basel), and Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery. He also presented a poster at the 2024 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, “Prognostic value of systemic inflammatory biomarkers detections in patients undergoing CRS-HIPEC by machine learning methods.”
Xin Gai earned his MS in statistical science at Duke University, after studying and working at Peking University and Tsinghua University. His research interests include EHR data analysis, high-dimensional statistics, statistical learning, and epidemiology. At Duke, Gai was a 2023 winner of the Dean’s Research Award for “Household Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 along the Evolution of Pandemic,” with advisor Anru Zhang. At the 2024 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, he presented “Subtype-aware registration of longitudinal electronic health records.”
Haoyue Li earned bachelor degrees in neurobiology and applied mathematics at the University of California San Diego, followed by an MS in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina Her current research interests include statistical genomics and computational multi-omics. Her previous research experience mainly focused on neurological disorders, but now she’s eager to explore using statistical tools to study different human diseases. Her publications include “Deep scRNA sequencing reveals a broadly applicable Regeneration Classifier and implicates antioxidant response in corticospinal axon regeneration,” in Neuron (2023).
Ashley Mullan earned bachelor’s degrees in applied math and philosophy at the University of Scranton, followed by an MS in statistics Wake Forest (where PhD alumni Lucy D’Agostino McGowan and Sarah Lotspeich are faculty). She has studied Antarctic seafloor biodiversity, trends in NHL draft and international game show strategy, and musical genre classification, and developed methods for misclassified data in relation to local food access. She is a member of ENAR‘s social media committee and co-chair of the Council of Emerging and New Statisticians.
Ningkun Zhou earned MS in biostatistics at Yale and bachelor’s degrees in statistics and biology at the University of Wisconsin, where he worked in the chemistry department’s Cavagnero Group, which focused on protein folding/aggregation in the cell and high-resolution molecular spectroscopy. Zhou’s research interests include high-dimensional analysis, simultaneous inference, biomarker study, statistical genetics, imaging, and Bayesian methods. His publications include “Fluorescence anisotropy decays and microscale-volume viscometry reveal the compaction of ribosome-bound nascent proteins,” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry (2021).
Curious about the rest of our students? View our full directory.
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