BIOS Seminars & Events

The Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics is recruiting several open-rank tenured, tenure-track, research-track, and teaching-track faculty positions. For more information, please click here. Interested applicants are welcome to contact Dr. Steve Qin/Dr. Lance Waller/Dr. Howard Chang

Dr. Zhaohui (Steve) Qin, zhaohui.qin@emory.edu

Dr. Lance Waller, lwaller@emory.edu

Dr. Howard Chang, howard.chang@emory.edu

Please see the bottom of the left panel of this page for Bios seminars and other events

Please check our BIOS newsletter, The BIOS BEAT, for more news and information

An In-depth Conversation with Dionne Price, 2023 President of the American Statistical Association

Dr. Simone Gray (CDC) interviews Dr. Dionne Price (FDA and BIOS alum) about Dr. Price’s journey to a deputy director position at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Click here to see more

Congrats to Raphiel Murden – First manuscript as the lead author was accepted for publication in Frontiers in Neuroscience-Brain Imaging Methods!

Raphiel would like to acknowledge his co-authors Zhenwu Zhang (at UNC), Ying Guo, and Ben Risk for their help and guidance.

     Raphiel Murden 

Congrats to Ramesh Manyam- The school's education committee unanimously approved "BIOS 585: Python programming (for BIOS)" for 3 credit hours!

The 'Python for non-BIOS" course is on its way to the education committee for review in November. Ramesh is also working on the "INFO 521: Databases using SQL" course to offer it as a 3-credit hour course (2 contact hours + 1-hour asynchronous component) going forward. Ramesh was invited by a student organization 'Rollins mHealth Collaboration' to host a 'SQL Workshop' and 60+ students enrolled for the event.

     Ramesh Manyam

Congrats to the Senior PhD Student Presentation Day Winners!

Congrats to the following Highlights/Achievements!

Lance Waller: Yakovlev Colloquium in the Dept of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at Univ of Rochester

      Lance Waller  

Avnika Amin: Paper coming out in Clinical Infectious Diseases

(https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciac699). Lance Waller is also a co-author on this paper. This paper shows convincingly and for the first time that Rotarix (the most commonly used rotavirus vaccine) is less effective against rotaviruses that are antigenically different from the vaccine formula.

    
     Avnika Amin                 Lance Waller 

Steve Qin, PhD, Yijuan Hu, PhD and Hao Wu, PhD gave a training seminar on Bioinformatics in Clinical Research yesterday (see flyers attached). We had 104 participants.

               
         Steve Qin                       Yijuan Hu                          Hao Wu

Razieh Nabi: recently got awarded for the BERD pilot grant titled “Tackling missing data from a causal and counterfactual point of view”.

 
     Razieh Nabi  

Ying Guo will be an invited speaker at the Second Penn Conference on Big Data in Biomedical and Population Health Sciences (September 19-20, 2022).

        Ying Guo 

Congrats to the following students for their Awards!

2022 - 2023 Livingston Fellow Winner : Yuzi Zhang

2022 - 2023 Michael H. Kutner Doctoral Student Award Winner : Ye Yue

Congrats to Dr. Limin Peng for been elected as an Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Fellow

Congrats to the following students for their Awards!

Penina and Michael Haber Award for Academic Excellence 2022: Yutong Liu & Mengke Du

            
                              Yutong Liu

            
                              Mengke Du

BIOS MSPH/MPH Poster Presentation Awards: Jing Shang, Elizabeth Fogleman, Nick Toumbacaris, Eric Chou

               .      
  Jing Shang       Elizabeth Fogleman    Nick Toumbacaris          Eric Chou

BIOS TA Award: Yuxuan Chen & Sohail Nizam

    
     Yuxuan Chen                Sohail Nizam

Shepard Award Nominee: Yajie Liu

    Yajie Liu 

Penina and Michael Haber PhD Award: Samuel Aiyedipe and Ziyue Wu (tie)

                     
    Samuel Aiyedipe                Ziyue Wu

Congrats to Drs. Lyles, Manyam, Wu and Easley for their Awards!

Bob Lyles – 2022 Thomas Sellers Award Winner

This award is presented to the faculty member of the Rollins School of Public Health who exemplifies the ideals of public health and who serves as a role model and mentor to his or her colleagues. 

       Bob Lyles

Ramesh Manyam – 2022 BIOS Teaching Award

This award is presented annually to a current faculty member who demonstrates excellence in teaching a BIOS or INFO course.

     Ramesh Manyam

Hao Wu – 2022 Mentorship Award

This award is presented annually by the students in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics to a current faculty member who demonstrates excellence in mentoring.

        Hao Wu

Kirk Easley – 2022 Michael J. Lynn Award

This award is presented annually and intended to recognize excellence in collaborative research as demonstrated by an article published within 2 years of the call for nominations. Though published in a non-statistical journal, the article should be impactful and should rely heavily on a solid and well-executed statistical analysis.

       Kirk Easley 

1st Info521 Databases Using SQL class, Spring 2022

We are very proud of our very first SQL Programming class this semester, taught by Dr. Rameshbabu Manyam, which our Adm Asst., Mrs. Mary Abosi, helped to organize. Great job team!

Congrats to Dr. Robert Krafty for his paper acceptance

Dr. Krafty has a paper that has been accepted in Psychological Medicine (IF 7.7) “A Lifespan Perspective on Depression in the Postpartum Period in a Racially and Socioeconomically Diverse Sample of Young Mothers”. This paper was done as part of his high school mentee’s training in applied statistical research.

      Robert Krafty

Congrats to Drs. Risk and Benkeser for their new R01 from NIMH  

Drs. Risk and Benkeser: New R01 from NIMH “Statistical approaches to improving functional connectivity estimates with an application to Autism”. Ben’s first R01 as PI and over $700k in total costs per year!

    
         Ben Risk                 David Benkeser

Congrats to Dr. Natalie Dean

Dr. Natalie was accepted into the COPSS Leadership Academy!

      Natalie Dean

Dr. Amita Manatunga has been appointed as the Chair of COPSS!

Amita Manatunga has been appointed as the Chair of COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies). The COPSS consists of 5 societies: ASA, ENAR, WNAR, IMS and SSC. COPSS is responsible for granting five awards (COPSS President’s Award, Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship, Florence Nightingale David Award, George W. Snedecor Award and Elizabeth L.
Scott Award). COPSS Leadership Academy is a new initiative for emerging leaders in statistics created by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, spearheaded by Bhramar Mukherjee.

  Amita Manatunga

Andrea Lane was featured in a magzine!

Andrea Lane, one of our PhD students was featured in a magazine targeted for
people with disability (LGMD-Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophies). This is a series on patients with LGMD, who have pursued careers in science and she was featured in this issue. The article begins on page 26. We are proud to have her in program! 

https://online.fliphtml5.com/emsr/tddg/#p=29

       Andrea Lane 

Dr. Amita Manatunga received a four-year funding

Amita Manatunga (Principal Investigator) received a four-year funding from the NIHLBI for the grant titled, “Developing Statistical Image Analysis Tools for Non-Invasive Monitoring of Anemia in Low Birth-Weight Infants”. Kirk Easley and Neeta Shenvi are personnel in this grant and they were instrumental in establishing a synergic collaborative team with pediatric neonatal researchers (Drs. Cassandra Josephson & Ravi Patel). A former PhD student, Dr. Jeong H. Jang has a sub-contract at Indiana University Medical Center。

  Amita Manatunga

Best Presentations Announcement

Congrats to Andrea Lane and Ying Cui for winning first place and second place on the 2021-2022 senior Ph.D. students presentation day!

    
       Andrea Lane                   Ying Cui

Congrats to Elliot Yang for his paper was accepted by Statistics in Medicine

Paper accepted at Statistics in Medicine titled “Casual Inference Methods for Vaccine Sieve Analysis with Effect Modification”. It’s a paper first authored by one of our former Master’s students, Elliot Yang.

       Elliot Yang

The paper "Distributional Independent Component Analysis for Diverse Neuroimaging Modalities" was selected as a Discussion Paper by Biometrics

The paper "Distributional Independent Component Analysis for Diverse Neuroimaging Modalities" by Ben Wu, Subhadip Pal, Jian Kang, and Ying Guo* (*: Corresponding Author) was selected as a Discussion Paper by Biometrics. Ben Wu and Subhadip Pal were postdocs in our department and are now tenure track assistant professors at the Renmin University of China and the University of Louisville, respectively.

         Ying Guo

2021 Patel-Naik Award Winners

Winners of the 2021 Patel-Naik Award are
i. Jialu Ran (1st Place)!
ii. Yuxuan Chen (2nd Place)!

   
         Jialu Ran                  Yuxuan Chen

1st Bios Python Programming class, Fall 2021

We are very proud of our very first Bios Python Programming class this semester, taught by Dr. Rameshbabu Manyam, in which our Adm Asst., Mrs. Mary Abosi, helped to organize. Great job team!

   
                    Bios Python Programming Class, Fall 2021   

The Emory University Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Announces the 2021 winner of the Kutner Award to be Dr. Rajan Patel

The Michael H. Kutner Alumni Award for Distinguished Service to the Discipline is given annually to a former Emory University Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics graduate student.

Dr. Patel received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Rice University in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He entered Emory's doctoral program in Biostatistics in 2002 and received his doctoral degree from Emory in 2006, working under his advisor Dr. DuBois Bowman. He developed novel statistical methods to analyze functional connectivity of the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Dr. Patel was selected by the Department of Biostatistics to be Emory’s first recipient of a Merck Company Scholarship in 2003 after his first year as a doctoral student.

Over the course of more than 14 years at Google, Dr. Patel has used his combination of statistical and computer science training to transform many of the products used across the world today. With Google Search, Dr. Patel developed the suite of experimentation tools we use thousands of times each year to make improvements to the core algorithms that power Search. From there, he led teams responsible for the freshness and topicality of search results. When you type a query to Google like, [who won the last Kutner award for distinguished service], the work he did to improve the freshness and topicality of Search is why we’re able to find the result showing the recent winner! This work affects over a billion users every day, and several billion searches a day.

Dr. Patel has always been unique in being able to combine his deep statistical understanding with his background in computer science to solve hard technical challenges, like understanding natural language in Search, or understanding images with Google Lens to build beautiful and simple products that have impacted billions of users across the world. Beyond Search, he also applied these ideas to kick off products like Gboard, the Android keyboard which autocorrects billions of words a day for hundreds of millions of users, and Google Podcasts, the best way to find and listen to audio on your phone. Impact like what he’s delivered doesn’t happen from just one person. Over the last 10 years, Dr. Patel has grown to become an excellent leader of junior engineers, analysts, and product managers, growing and leading teams of more than 300 people to help build Search, Google Lens, ARCore, Gboard, Google Podcasts, and now recently consumer shopping experiences across Google. For his contributions, over the last 14 years, Dr. Patel has been promoted through the ranks at Google, from a Level 4 Research Scientist to now being the Vice President of Engineering in the Consumer Shopping group at Google.

Prior to joining Google in 2007, Dr. Patel worked at Amgen, Inc. as a Senior Biostatistician and then a Biostatistics Manager for 2006 and 2007. At Amgen, Dr. Patel conducted statistical analyses for early phase clinical trials and pre-clinical trials and wrote statistical analysis plans, contributed heavily to clinical trial protocols, and worked with physicians, data managers, and clinical trial specialists to run early phase clinical trials.

   
            Rajan Patel                  

2021 RSGA BIOS Representatives re-election

Thank you to our outgoing SGA Representatives: Feier Han, Zoey Zuo for all their hard work and dedication to the BIOS students and department! And congratulations to the new incoming 2022 BIOS RSPH student Government Association Representatives: Gaby Blade and Nicole Chen!

                     
         Feier Han                    Zoey Zuo                    Gaby Blade                  Nicole Chen           

Hao Wu obtained a new NIH R01 grant

Hao Wu obtained a new NIH R01 grant titled “Dissecting epitranscriptomic signal from complex tissues”.

         Hao Wu 

Congrats to Joshua Lukemire for winning the Kutner Best Poster award for junior faculty and post-docs!

   Joshua Lukemire 

Alex Edwards is a co-author on a paper recently accepted in Science “A Year of Genomic Surveillance Reveals how the SARS-COV-2 Pandemic Unfolded in Africa.”

 
      Alex Edwards 

Congrats to Jeff for being a member of the American Cancer Society's journal!

    Jeff Switchenko

Max's study of transmission dynamics of COVID-19, was funded by the Dean’s 2021 Pilot Innovation Award 

One of Max’s proposals, the study of transmission dynamics of COVID-19, was funded by the
Dean’s 2021 Pilot Innovation Award ($50,000 over 1 year).

         Max Lau

Natalie Dean's co-authored editorial in the NEJM was published on September 8th, 2021

Co-Authored an editorial in the NEJM with colleagues. The editorial is titled, “COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness and the Test Negative Design”, published September 8th, 2021. Please see the link to view. 

      Natalie Dean

Bios Chair, Dr. Robert Krafty had his first 4 papers accepted whose work was done while he was at Emory

Bios Chair, Dr. Robert Krafty had his first 4 papers accepted whose work was done while he was at Emory: a Biometrics paper for interpretable statistical learning for time-frequency analysis first-authored by a former Ph.D. student, a Frontiers in Neurology paper evaluating deep learning to reduce patient burden when evaluating MS patients with MRI first-authored by a former masters student, a Translational Psychiatry paper introducing higher criticism for understanding irreproducible results in clinical studies using fMRI connectivity first-authored by his current post-doc, and a European Respiratory Journal article understanding interaction of age and drug effects in pulmonary fibrosis that came through the BCC.

      Robert Krafty

2021 Livingston Fellow

Please congratulate Ying Cui to be the 2021 Livingston Fellow because of her scholarly contributions to BIOS, LGS, RSPH, and Emory!

         Ying Cui

2021 Michael H. Kutner Doctoral Student Award

Please congratulate Zhenxing Guo who wins the 2021 Michael H.Kutner Doctoral student Award because of her scholarly contributions to BIOS, LGS, RSPH, and Emory!

      Zhenxing Guo

2021 Qualifying Exam Top Performers

2021 qualifying exam top performers are Jacob Englert, Sam Yin, Qile Dai, and Guangming Yang. Congratulations to them!

             2021 Qualifying Exam Top Performers

Natalie Dean was quoted in the July 26th “The Morning” edition of the New York Times

Natalie Dean was quoted in the July 26th “The Morning” edition of the New York Times in an article by David Leonhardt entitled Good morning. We offer advice about thinking through breakthrough infections.

      Natalie Dean

Donna Brogan, Professor Emerita spoke about the Origins and Early Days of Caucus for Women in Statistics

Per Amita Manatunga, at the joint statistical meeting, Caucus for Women in Statistics celebrated the 50-Year History of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. As the founder of the Caucus in 1970's, Donna Brogan, Professor Emerita spoke about the Origins and Early Days of Caucus for Women in Statistics.

     Donna Brogan

Dr. Steve Pittard reports that project E-CARE, which is an AI-assisted recruitment tool funded by the Georgia Research Alliance will now be the subject of a semester-long collaboration and business case analysis by students in the TI

Steve Pittard reports that project E-CARE, which is an AI-assisted recruitment tool funded by the Georgia Research Alliance will now be the subject of a semester-long collaboration and business case analysis by students in the TI: GER program. The TI: GER effort, (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results), is a nationally recognized collaboration between Emory Law and the Georgia Institute of Technology which brings together graduate students in business, science, law, and engineering to work on start-up projects to transform highly promising research into economically viable projects.

     Steve Pittard

Teng Fei defended his dissertation proposal on July 15th

Teng Fei defended his dissertation proposal on July 15th;

Title: Latent Class Methods for Complex Chronic Disease Data

         Teng Fei

Raphiel Murden defended his Dissertation Proposal on July 22nd

Raphiel Murden defended his Dissertation Proposal on July 22nd;

Title:
Topics in Data Integration Methods for Neuroimaging and Generalized Additive Mixed Models for Ambulatory Blood Pressure Curves and Psychosocial Stressors

     Raphiel Murden

Grace Kim defended her Dissertation Proposal on July 23rd

Grace Kim defended her Dissertation Proposal on July 23rd;

Title: Flexible Methods to Incorporate Covariates in Latent Class Analysis.

        Grace Kim

Dr. Howard Chang received an NIH Supplement to study the impacts of heat on Alzheimer's disease morbidity

Congratulations to Dr. Howard Chang for receiving an NIH Supplement to study the impacts of heat on Alzheimer's disease morbidity.

     Howard Chang

Dr. Renee Moore has contributed to a chapter to a book titled “Leadership in Statistics and Data Science: Planning for Inclusive Excellence” edited by Amanda Golbeck and published by Springer

Dr. Renee Moore has contributed to a chapter to a book titled “Leadership in Statistics and Data Science: Planning for Inclusive Excellence” edited by Amanda Golbeck and published by Springer. The title of Renee’s chapter is “My Journey to Leadership” during which she shares 21 Lessons Learned/Highlights from her journey as a student at an all-women’s HBCU to a faculty member at a research 1 institute. Renee highlights many of her Emory BIOS mentors and colleagues in the chapter.

      Renee Moore

Dr. Renee Moore is a co-author of the recently published article “Data and Safety Monitoring of COVID-19 Vaccine Clinical Trials” appearing in the "The Journal of Infectious Diseases"

Dr. Renee Moore is a co-author of the recently published article “Data and Safety Monitoring of COVID-19 Vaccine Clinical Trials” appearing in the "The Journal of Infectious Diseases". The article is accompanied with a commentary by Lawrence Corey who titled his comments as “Behind the Scenes Heroes: the COVID-19 Vaccine Data and Safety Monitoring Board”.

      Renee Moore

Dr. Lance Waller has been named to a three-year term on the US Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee

Dr. Lance Waller has been named to a three-year term on the US Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee (1-2 meetings a year).

      Lance Waller

Dr. Steve Pittard and his team just received a second round of funding from the Georgia Research Alliance

Dr. Steve Pittard and his team just received a second round of funding from the Georgia Research Alliance to continue development of E-CARE which is a product that employs Natural Language Processing to identify qualified candidates for multi-leveled clinical research positions. Steve is the entrepreneurial lead for this project which involves Biostatistics, School of Nursing, Emory Computer Science, Human Resources and the Office of Technology Transfer. “Our intent is to commercialize this technology and license it to major vendors of Applicant Tracking Systems.”

      Steve Pittard

Dr. Dionne Price Elected President of American Statistical Association

Congratulations to BIOS alumna, Dr. Dionne Price of the Food and Drug Administration, who was elected President of the American Statistical Association! Great news and recognition of her leadership!

Dionne Price Elected President of American Statistical Association

      Dionne Price

The Award for the best Ph.D. Senior Student Presentation

Each year, students who have reached candidacy and above give a brief presentation of their dissertation research. The winners for 2021 best Ph.D. Senior Student Presentation is "Latent Class Analysis for Time-to-event Data" by Teng Fei. Congratulation!

         Teng Fei

The Livingston Fellowship Award Winner

The Livingston Fellowship Award is given by the Dean’s Office for the most promising or best-performing Ph.D. student in each of the doctoral programs housed within RSPH. Bo Wei is the winner of this prize in 2021. Congratulations!

           Bo Wei

The Patel-Naik Award Winner

The Patel-Naik Award is given annually to one or two pre-candidacy Ph.D. students who develop an outstanding and innovative research proposal. This award is made possible through the generous contribution of alumni Rajan Patel and Kinnery Naik Patel. Congratulations to Shiyu Wang, who is the owner of this prize in 2021! The title of his presentation is "A Deep Neural Network Architecture for the Reconstruction of Subcellular Spatial Structures from Genome Data".

       Shiyu Wang

The Michael H. Kutner Doctoral Student Award

The Michael H. Kutner Doctoral Student Award is given annually to an outstanding Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics who has passed the qualifying exams, demonstrates strong leadership skills, and has conducted excellent research. Raphiel Murden is the winner of this prize in 2021. Congratulations!

    Raphiel Murden

The 2021 Penina and Michael Haber Award for Academic Excellence

This award is given annually to two Master’s students seeking a degree in Biostatistics within the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory University. The award recognizes an MPH student and an MSPH student who excel in their academic pursuits during the first year of the program with the highest GPA.  This award is made possible through the generous contribution of Dr. Michael and Mrs. Penina Haber. Congratulations to Tingyang Hu and Lei Wang for winning this prize!

    
       Tingyang Hu                      Lei Wang

The Penina and Michael Haber Doctoral Award

The Penina and Michael Haber Doctoral Award is given annually to a doctoral student seeking a degree in Biostatistics within the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory University. The award recognizes a student(s) who successfully progress towards a degree in the least number of semesters. Congratulations to Joshua Lukemire who won this prize!

    Joshua Lukemire

The BIOS Best Teaching Assistant Award

This year, the BIOS Best Teaching Assistant Award was given to Shijia Bian. Congratulations to her!

        Shijia Bian

The BIOS Award for the Best Capstone/Thesis Video Presentation

The 2021 BIOS Best Capstone/Thesis Video Presentation Award was given to JaNae Holloway, Sabah Munir, and Aiwen Yao. Congratulations!

         
    JaNae Holloway               Sabah Munir                     Aiwen Yao

The 2021 Rollins School of Public Health Charles C. Shepard Award

This award is given annually to the graduating RSPH master's students who are deemed by the faculty to have prepared the most scholarly research paper. BIOS students Xin Wei and Xiaobo Yan were nominated as the BIOS candidates for the award, congratulations!

    
           Xin Wei                           Xiaobo Yan

The Michael H. Kutner Award for Distinguished Service to the Discipline

This award is given annually to a former graduate of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics (and including all predecessor department names) at Emory University. The 2021 winner is Dr. Cheryl Addy.

     
     Cheryl Addy

The Michael Lynn Award Winner

Congratulations to Dr. David Benkeser, the winner of the 2021 Michael Lynn Award.

    David Benkeser

The 2021 BIOS Faculty Mentor Award

Congratulations to Dr. Yi-An Ko, the winner of the 2021 BIOS Faculty Mentor Award.

         Yi-An Ko

The 2021 BIOS Teaching Award

Congratulations to Dr. Ben Risk, the winner of the BIOS Teaching Award.

          Ben Risk

New Administrative Assistant!

Mary Abosi has been promoted to Administrative Assistant!

       Mary Abosi

Dr. Howard Chang has been promoted to Full Professor with Tenure!

Howard Chang has been promoted to Full Professor with Tenure!

     Howard Chang

Dr. Rob Krafty has been Award Tenure!

Dr. Rob Krafty has been award tenure and the title has changed from Acting Professor to Rollins Professor!

         Rob Krafty

Dr. Rob Krafty is featured in the Rollins Magazine, Spring 2021

Dr. Robert Krafty’s work aims to better understand and treat mental and behavioral health. His tools—algorithms, statistical models, and machine learning. He uses these to translate the massive data gleaned from MRIs, fMRIs, EEGs, and wearable devices like FitBits into something that can be understood. “My work involves collaborating with teams of clinicians and other scientists,” he says. “I do the math that can unlock useful information contained in the data.”

       Rob Krafty

Dr. Lance Waller's paper was accepted at Harvard Data Science Review

Lance Waller’s paper “Building intuition regarding the statistical behavior of mass medical testing programs” with Taal Levi (Oregon State) was accepted at Harvard Data Science Review. It should be online soon.

       Lance Waller

Stata 17 incorporated Dr.Mary Kelley's method as a new feature

Mary Kelley’s method for analyzing zero-inflated ordinal logistic regression has been incorporated as a new feature in Stata 17.

         Mary Kelly

Congratulate Dr. Ying Guo and Ben Risk!

Ying Guo has been elected Chair and Ben Risk as Program Chair for the Statistical Methods In Imaging Section of the ASA.

     
         Ying Guo                      Ben Risk

Congratulate the following PhD students!

Ph.D. students graduating in May are Meng Shi, Joshua Lukemire, and Behzad Kianian.
They have secured jobs as follows:
i. Meng Shi is currently working at Facebook as a software engineer at messaging search ranking and backend team. Her advisor is Michael Haber.
ii. Joshua Lukemire will begin his Postdoctoral Fellowship position in medical imaging at Emory University. His advisor is Suprateek Kundu.OS
iii. Behzad Kianian has accepted a position at The Centers for Disease Control. His advisor is Lance Waller.

        
        Meng Shi                 Joshua Lukemire           Behzad Kianian

PhD students with internships 

Ph.D. students with internships include Ganzhong Tian / Amazon, Inc., Sohail Nizam / Uber, Ying Cui/ Pfizer, Yingtian Hu/AbbVie, Ziyue Wu/ Facebook, Inc.

              
     Ganzhong Tian              Sohail Nizam                    Ying Cui                     Yingtian Hu

        Ziyue Wu

Good News from Dr. Christina Mehta!

Cecile Lahiri, one of the investigators that Dr. Christina Mehta has worked with since she was junior faculty, received her first R01! They will be continuing their work on examining the role of INSTIs on health outcomes for persons living with HIV. Besides, Dr. Christina Mehta was recently selected to be ENAR Diversity Liaison.

     
     Cecile Lahiri                 Christina Mehta

Congratulate these MASTER Students!

Dr. Christina Mehta's APE student, JaNae Holloway, was a finalist for the Outstanding APE award. She recently presented her work to Dean Curran. Dr. Christina Mehta's Capstone student Patrick Zhang got a CDC Public Health Informatics fellowship.

     
    JaNae Holloway              Patrick Zhang

Dr. Suprateek Kundu has been Reappointed to the Editorial Board of Biometrics

   Suprateek Kundu

BIOS Student Shauna McManus has Accepted a Fully Remote Job with Pharmerit

BIOS student Shauna McManus has accepted a fully remote job with Pharmerit, an OPEN Health company. She will be working on patient-centered outcomes research, with a main focus on oncology projects. Through this research, she will work with the FDA to integrate patient-reported data into clinical trials in a meaningful and statistically rigorous manner. 

   Shauna McManus

BS/MSPH student Alec Reinhardt Received Highest Honors for his Undergraduate Honors Thesis

    Alec Reinhardt

Congratulate Joy Hearn!

       Joy Hearn

News from the RSPH Staff Council

     
 Shirin Jabbarzadeh         Angela Guinyard

Steve Pittard has Completed the 12-Month Woodruff Health Educators Academy (WHEA)

      
        Steve Pittard 

Dr. Howard Chang is Involved in a New NIH R21 Project

Howard Chang is involved with a new NIH R21 project on modeling dust storms and their health effects in the southwestern US.

      
       Howard Chang

Dr. Lance Waller was quoted in a “How Stuff Works” post

Dr. Lance Waller was quoted in a “How Stuff Works” post on the “Bayes’ Theorem Helps Us Nail Down Probabilities”. Link for more information.

      
       Lance Waller

Dr. Michael Kutner will Receive the 2021 Karl E. Peace Award from ASA in August

      
     Michael Kutner

PhD Student Durant Moore was Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel

      
      Durant Moore

Congratulate!

     David Benkeser

Dr. Amita Manatunga and Dr. Renee Moore were Honored at ENAR's 20th Anniversary Celebration

     
   Amita Manatunga           Renee Moore   

Dr. Rob Krafty Published his First Paper on Health in Atlanta

Dr. Rob Krafty has first paper looking at health in Atlanta:  “Greenspace Redevelopment, Residential Displacement, and Sleep Quality among Black Adults in Southwest Atlanta” - Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.

         Rob Krafty

Congratulate these MSPH students!

MSPH student Hannah Kalvin has accepted the position of Assistant Research Biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Hannah has worked with Renee Moore in BCC on several epidemiology projects and with Jeff Switchenko (her capstone advisor) analyzing the relationship between breast cancer mortality and BMI. Hannah is looking forward to moving to New York City (once it is safe to do so) and beginning her career as a collaborative biostatistician in oncology research.

MSPH student Brendan Ceretto-Clark recently accepted a full-time position at The Emmes Company, LLC as an Associate Biostatistician and successfully negotiated a competitive salary, sign-on bonus, and benefits. The position will be remote for now but Brendan is looking forward to moving to Washington D.C in 2022 and working on ophthalmology, oncology, opioid addiction, and other clinical trials. His advisor is Jose Binongo.

     
    Hannah Kalvin         Brendan Ceretto-Clark

Paul Weiss’s “first-author” Paper was Accepted

     Paul Weiss

Dr. Suprateek Kundu Received his Second R01 from NIA

   Suprateek Kundu

Phd students Interned at Uber and Facebook

     
     Sohail Nizam                  Ziyue Wu    

Teng Fei Accepted a Position at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

        Teng Fei 

Congratulate Raphiel Murden!

Congratulate Raphiel Murden, who is one of only five LGS student inductees of the Edward A. Bouchet Honor Society in 2020. A great honour and well-deserved. Link.

   Raphiel Murden

Dr. David Benkeser is Working with the NIH-led Trials to Identify which Immune Responses Drive the Vaccine’s Effectiveness

David Benkeser was featured and quoted in an online CNN article, “Changes to coronavirus vaccine schedule wouldn't start with FDA, the agency says”. He is currently working with the NIH-led trials to prepare for the analysis of immune response data from the large US trials to identify which immune responses are driving the vaccine’s effect. “If we can identify the immune responses that are important for preventing COVID, then we can potentially open up accelerated pathways for approval of new vaccines and/or existing vaccines in new populations (e.g., children or pregnant women).”

     David Benkeser

Dr. Renee Moore published an article in the Journal of Statistics Education

Renee Moore was a co-author in the article “Creating and Sustaining Effective Pipeline Initiatives to Increase Diversity in Biostatistics: The ENAR Fostering Diversity in Biostatistics Workshop", published in Journal of Statistics Education, 2020.

     Renee Moore

Dr. Rob Krafty's Two Senior Author Publications were Accepted

Dr. Rob Krafty had his first two senior author publications while at Emory accepted, a methodological paper in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics and an applied.

         Rob Krafty

Zhenxing Guo Won the 2021 JSM Student Paper Award

Zhenxing Guo won the 2021 JSM Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics (SGG).

     Zhenxing Guo

Ying Cui Received a Couple of Paper Awards

Ying Cui, a PhD student, won several paper awards:

• 2021 ENAR Distinguished Student Paper award (based on a paper supervised by Limin Peng);
• 1st place in the ASA Medical Device and Diagnostic Section’s 2020-21 student paper.

      
         Ying Cui                       

Congratulations to Yingtian Hu and Josh Lukemire! 

Yingtian Hu was a winner and Josh Lukemire a runner-up for the Statistics in Imaging Section of the ASA’s Student Paper Competition.

     
      Yingtian Hu                 Josh Lukemire                    

Steve Pittard and Dr. Steve Qin Received a Grant from the Emory Center

Steve Pittard and Dr. Steve Qin received a $350 grant from the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence Mini-Grant program to finance software to develop educational videos for deployment on YouTube and Canvas. It will be used to provide expanded content for students of BIOS 534 Machine Learning and BIOS 545 Intro to R.

      
        Steve Qin                 Steve Pittard    

The 2020 PATEL-NAIK AWARD

Shiyu Wang was the winner of the 2020 PATEL-NAIK AWARD. Congratulations on his outstanding project submission, which is a deep neural network architecture for the reconstruction of subcellular spatial structures from genome data.

      
     Shiyu Wang