News
Tianyi Sun dissertation defense – October 31
Oct. 17, 2024—PhD candidate Tianyi Sun is defending her dissertation on Thursday, October 31, at 9 a.m. Central Time. Her advisor is Dandan Liu. All are invited and encouraged to attend. The defense will be conducted in Suite 1020, Room 10105 (10th floor conference room) at 2525 West End Avenue. It will also be streamed on Zoom;...
Tianyi Sun is first author of Statistics in Medicine paper
Oct. 2, 2024—Congratulations to PhD candidate Tianyi Sun on the publication of “Addressing the implementation challenge of risk prediction model due to missing risk factors: The submodel approximation approach,” which was published online ahead of print in Statistics in Medicine on September 12. Associate professor Dandan Liu is corresponding author, with Allison McCoy (associate professor of biomedical informatics)...
2024 Graduate Program Awards
Sep. 24, 2024—On Wednesday, September 18, 2024, these students and faculty members were recognized at an all-department meeting for their achievements: Megan Jones was named Distinguished Teaching Assistant, in recognition of excellence in teaching and dedication to peer education. Kaidi Kang was presented with the W. S. Gosset Award for Exceptional Research, in recognition of exemplary...
Our new PhD students – Fall 2024
Sep. 18, 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...
October 3: Optimize Your Application to Our Program
Sep. 12, 2024—ETA 10/7/2025: View a recording of the session. Interested in earning a master’s or doctoral degree in biostatistics? Join us on Thursday, October 3, at 6 p.m. Central Time for our virtual info session on submitting your application to Vanderbilt University. Hear from Simon Vandekar, director of graduate recruitment, about what admissions committee members look...
GammaGateR featured in NCI CBIIT News
Sep. 11, 2024—On September 4, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) featured the statistical software package GammaGateR on the News page for its Center for Biomedical Informatics & Information Technology, with the headline “GammaGateR Helps Decipher Imaging Data.” See our June 9 post for details about the paper announcing GammaGateR in Bioinformatics, with PhD candidate Jiangmei Ruby Xiong as...
Our new MS students – Fall 2024
Sep. 8, 2024—We are delighted to welcome seven new students to our master’s degree program this fall. Camila Carmona earned associate degrees in mathematics, economics, and philosophy at Santa Rosa Junior College, followed by bachelor’s degrees in statistics and philosophy at Sonoma State University. Carmona’s first biostatistics project was about the impact of remote instruction on...
2024 Faculty lightning talks
Aug. 20, 2024—Each year, members of our faculty participate in lightning talks as an opportunity to share their research interests, current projects, and potential collaboration opportunities with students in our graduate program. These presentations help students explore different avenues of investigation and brainstorm potential projects that can contribute to their theses or dissertations. Here are the faculty...
Siwei Zhang is first author of JAMIA paper
Aug. 13, 2024—Congratulations to PhD candidate Siwei Zhang, alumnus Nicholas Strayer (PhD 2020; now at Posit), senior biostatistician Yajing Li, and assistant professor Yaomin Xu on the publication of “PheMIME: an interactive web app and knowledge base for phenome-wide, multi-institutional multimorbidity analysis” in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association on August 10. As stated in the...
Congratulations to our August 2024 graduates
Aug. 8, 2024—Left to right: top, Jamie Joseph, Julia Thome, Shengxin Tu; bottom, Megan Hall, Julia Whitman We are thrilled to celebrate the graduations of five students in our program. Click their names for more information. Dissertations and theses will be viewable at Vanderbilt’s Institutional Repository later this year. Jamie Joseph, PhD, completed a dissertation titled “Causal...
Students and alumni at JSM 2024
Aug. 7, 2024—The annual Joint Statistical Meetings draw more than five thousand attendees from over fifty countries every year. The 2024 edition of this conference is taking place in Portland, Oregon, with more than two dozen department members and alumni making the trip to Rose City to discuss “Statistics and Data Science: Informing Policy and Countering Misinformation,”...
Yuqi Tian is first author of JASA paper
Jun. 21, 2024—Congratulations to Yuqi Tian (PhD 2022), former associate professor Chun Li (now at University of Southern California), soon-to-graduate doctoral candidate Shengxin Tu, Nathan T. James (PhD 2022), and professors Frank Harrell and Bryan Shepherd on the publication of “Addressing Multiple Detection Limits with Semiparametric Cumulative Probability Models” in Journal of the American Statistical Association. The article first...
Jamie Gudeon Joseph dissertation defense – June 20
Jun. 13, 2024—PhD candidate Jamie Gudeon Joseph will defend her dissertation on Thursday, June 20, at 11 a.m. Central Time. Her advisor is Andrew Spieker. All are invited and encouraged to attend. The defense will be held in the department’s large conference room on the 11th floor (suite 1100, room 11105) at 2525 West End Avenue. It...
Max Rohde is first author of Statistics in Medicine tutorial
Jun. 11, 2024—Congratulations to PhD candidate Maximilian Rohde on the publication of Bayesian transition models for ordinal longitudinal outcomes in Statistics in Medicine. The paper was co-authored by professor Benjamin French, adjoint professor Thomas G. Stewart, and professor Frank Harrell. In the words of the tutorial abstract: “Ordinal longitudinal outcomes are becoming common in clinical research, particularly in the...
Jiangmei Xiong is first author of Bioinformatics paper
Jun. 9, 2024—Congratulations to PhD candidate Jiangmei Ruby Xiong on the publication of GammaGateR: Semi-automated marker gating for single-cell multiplexed imaging in Bioinformatics on June 4. The paper was co-authored by assistant professor Siyuan Ma and associate professor Simon Vandekar, with colleagues in Vanderbilt’s Program of Chemical and Physical Biology and its Epithelial Biology Center, as well as...