News
Julia Thome dissertation defense – June 21
Jun. 7, 2024—PhD candidate Julia Thome will defend her dissertation on Friday, June 21, at 10 a.m. Central Time. 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. Her advisor is Bryan Shepherd. All are invited and encouraged to attend. Assessing the...
Julia Thome is first author of Public Health Reports paper
May. 29, 2024—Congratulations to PhD candidate Julia Thome on the publication of Reporting of Child Maltreatment During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Southern State in the United States in Public Health Reports last week, online ahead of print. The paper was co-authored by associate professor Rameela Raman and colleagues at the Vanderbilt Center of Excellence for Children in...
Congratulations to our May graduates
May. 8, 2024—We are thrilled to celebrate the graduations of Nate Dowd, Kenneth Liao, Cara Lwin, and Nick Micheletti, as well as welcoming back several recent graduates who will also march in Friday’s Commencement ceremony. Here are details about our four newest Masters of Science in Biostatistics – click their names for more information and to read...
Shengxin Tu dissertation defense – May 10
Apr. 26, 2024—PhD candidate Shengxin Tu will defend her dissertation on Friday, May 10, at 8 a.m. Central Time, at 2525 West End Avenue, in the 11th floor large conference room (suite 1100, room 11105). Her advisor is Bryan Shepherd. All are invited and encouraged to attend. Rank-Based Analyses and Designs with Clustered Data Clustered data are...
Yeji Ko is first author of Annals of Epidemiology paper
Apr. 18, 2024—Congratulations to PhD student Yeji Ko on the publication of Adjustment for duration of employment in occupational epidemiology in the June 2024 issue of Annals of Epidemiology (appearing online ahead of print this week). Professor Ben French, who was recently elected to the National Council for Radiation Protection and Measurements, is the paper’s corresponding author. Ko,...
Shengxin Tu wins 2024 Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award
Apr. 17, 2024—PhD candidate Shengxin Tu has been named a recipient of Vanderbilt’s Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award, which “recognizes doctoral students who exhibit exceptional academic excellence in publications, awards, patents, and other forms of national or international distinction” with $2,500 in supplemental funding. Tu is first author of a recent paper in the prestigious Statistics in Medicine...
Rohde and Whitman at Translational Science 2024
Apr. 4, 2024—Translational Science 2024 is underway, with the theme of “Translational Science Innovation to Increase Equity,” and the presenters have included two current students. PhD candidate Maximilian Rohde is primary author of Participation of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Decentralized Trials: The ACTIV-6 Experience, and MS student Julia Whitman is primary author of Impact of ACTIV-6...
Kang, Sun, and Yao at ENAR 2024
Mar. 13, 2024—ENAR 2024 is taking place in Baltimore this week, and participants from Vanderbilt Biostatistics have included the following: PhD student Lydia Yao chaired an invited session, “Knowledge Synthesis Between Psychometric and Neuroimaging Methods: Network Modeling, Latent Factors and More” PhD candidate Kaidi Kang presented a talk, “Study Features that Improve Replicability of Brain-Wide Association Studies.”...
Chiara Di Gravio is first author of Biometrics paper
Mar. 7, 2024—Congratulations to recent PhD graduate Chiara Di Gravio and her dissertation advisers, professor Jonathan Schildcrout and associate professor Ran Tao, on the publication of Efficient designs and analysis of two-phase studies with longitudinal binary data in the March 2024 issue of Biometrics. The paper presents a flexible full-cohort analysis method known as an efficient sieve maximum...
Shengxin Tu is first author on clustered data paper
Feb. 16, 2024—PhD candidate Shengxin Tu, who presented a seminar on between- and within-cluster Spearman rank correlations last week, is first author of a methods paper titled Rank intraclass correlation for clustered data that Statistics in Medicine published in 2023 (online in August and in print in October), with professor Bryan Shepherd as corresponding author. Statistics in Medicine has...
Congratulations to our December graduates
Dec. 15, 2023—We are thrilled to celebrate the graduations of Hannah Weeks and Elisa Yazdani. Weeks defended her dissertation, “Overcoming Challenges with Real World Data and Clinical Restrictions in Pharmacokinetic Analyses,” in October. Yazdani’s master’s thesis is titled “A Pipeline for High-Throughput Drug Screening,” and she is presently on the research team for Harnessing Big Data to...
Max Rohde is first author on new gene therapy research paper
Nov. 15, 2023—PhD candidate Max Rohde is first author on “Practical and Statistical Considerations for the Long Term Follow-Up of Gene Therapy Trial Participants” published recently in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics. The paper outlines “some of the key considerations for designing long term follow-up protocols in the gene therapy setting” and offers “guidance for innovative operational and statistical methods...
Improving Your Odds: Optimizing Your Vanderbilt Biostatistics Application
Nov. 2, 2023—Interested in becoming a biostatistician? Join us on Thursday, November 9, at 6 p.m. Central Time for our virtual info session on applying to our graduate program. Hear directly from our directors of graduate studies and recruitment about what they look for in prospective MS and PhD students, life in Nashville, student successes, and more....
Hannah Weeks dissertation defense – October 24
Oct. 17, 2023—PhD candidate Hannah L. Weeks will defend her dissertation on Tuesday, October 24, at 10 a.m. Central Time, at 2525 West End Avenue, in the 10th floor conference room (suite 1020, room 10105). Her advisor is Matthew Shotwell. All are invited and encouraged to attend. Overcoming Challenges with Real World Data and Clinical Restrictions in...
Welcome to our 2023 first-year cohort
Aug. 31, 2023—We are delighted to welcome seven new students to our program this fall. Kaixing “Charlie” Liu is a new student in our MS program. A native of China, he majored in biological science at Tsinghua University, minoring in economics and statistics. His studies there shaped his interest in the intersection of statistics, health, and programming, and...