Blog

Panpan Zhang (right, in Vanderbilt hoodie), assistant professor of biostatistics and neurology, has been named the first-ever Early Career Representative on the Data Core Steering Committee of the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center, which is the Alzheimer's disease research center program of the National Institute on Aging. Committee members serve three-year terms. Dr. Zhang is on the Vanderbilt Memory & Alzheimer's Center faculty, Local Committee co-chair for the 2024 International Chinese Statistical Association's Applied Statistics Symposium, co-chair of the 2025 Institute of Mathematical Statistics' New Researchers Conference, and associate editor of Journal of Data Science and Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability.  

The Department of Biostatistics' Statistical Computing Series focuses on the implementation of statistical models and methods, statistical computation and graphics. These informal meetings allow experienced statisticians and developers to share their expertise on computing topics with practitioners across Vanderbilt. On Thursday, April 25, at 2:30 p.m., assistant professor Panpan Zhang will present "Fundamentals of building R packages."

From Dr. Zhang:

This presentation targets audiences with zero or limited knowledge of building R packages. In this presentation, I will introduce some fundamentals of building an R package, including but not limited to the generations of NAMESPACE, DESCRIPTION, and R Documents. With the increasing demand for intensive computation (e.g., numerical integration), I will also discuss how to interface CPP files (primarily based on Rcpp and Rcpp Armadillo) into an R package. Lastly, I will show a few fundamental techniques for testing R packages.

For access to this Teams presentation, contact Ryan Moore. 

We are delighted to announce the promotion of Jessica "Jess" Lai to lead program manager, in effect as of March 29. With extensive experience as a central scheduling supervisor (for Nationwide Children's Hospital) and patient access manager (for Ohio State University Medical Center), Lai was recruited to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2021 as a senior program manager for VICTR. She has been essential to the success of numerous projects that depend on large-scale data coordination, such as Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV), the Influenza and Other Viruses in the AcutelY Ill (IVY) Network, the Respiratory Virus Transmission Network (RVTN), and more. She is also a key player in process creation and improvement for the Vanderbilt Biostatistics Data Coordinating Center (VBDCC), our Biostatistics Clinics, and other research support entities. She is from Puerto Rico, and her favorite activities outside of work include cooking, biking, and listening to podcasts. 

Jess Lai (left) chats with Lauren King and Nicole Gunnison during the department's winter celebration luncheon, January 2024 

Congratulations to assistant professor Bryan Blette on the publication of "Assessing treatment effect heterogeneity in the presence of missing effect modifier data in cluster-randomized trials," published today in Statistical Methods in Medical Research. In the words of senior author Michael Hardy, it is a "great methods review & very clever simulation study - give it a read!" 

Dr. Blette is also delivering an invited talk this week, in the "Generative AI as a Tool for Advancing Translational Science: Opportunities and Potential Pitfalls" session at Translational Science 2024. Other department members in Las Vegas for the conference include PhD candidate Max Rohde (poster presenter), MS student Julia Whitman (poster presenter), professor Paul Harris (invited speaker), and associate professor Dandan Liu (ACTStat president-elect). Consuelo Wilkins, Vanderbilt University Medical Center's senior vice president and senior associate dean for health equity and inclusive excellence, is also a speaker, as are several other faculty members across the School of Medicine.

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Dr. Quanhu "Tiger" Sheng to associate professor of biostatistics, educator track, effective as of April 1. A graduate of Nanjing University (BS, botany) and the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (MS, biochemistry and molecular biology; PhD, bioinformatics), Dr. Sheng is deputy technical director of VANGARD and leader of its team for migrating BioVU (the world's largest DNA biobank based at a single academic institution) to the cloud. An expert in bioinformatics methods for the analysis of high-throughput genomics data, including next-generation sequencing data (RNA-seq, DNA-seq, and miRNA-seq), proteomics, glycomics, and metabolomics, Dr. Sheng has been actively involved in developing new algorithms, curating analysis pipelines, and implementing software since his arrival at Vanderbilt University in 2012, initially as a postdoctoral research fellow and subsequently as an instructor in the Department of Cancer Biology. He has published more than one hundred peer-reviewed papers while working in Nashville, with more than twenty-five as first or corresponding author. His service at Vanderbilt University Medical Center includes participating on the Bioinformatics Staff Search Committee, the Bioinformatics Staff Promotions Committee, the IT Staff Promotions Committee, the Cloud Advisory Committee, the Graduate Student Admissions Committee, and the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Program Review Committee. At the Jon Brown Lab, he has been a key contributor to many publications, including the landmark 2021 Nature paper on progeria, and he has played an essential role in training and mentoring graduate students and other junior researchers across the School of Medicine's research enterprise. He has been involved with the creation of numerous software tools, including AnnoGen, CPDSeqer, ExonDel, GLMVC, heatmap3, MultiRankSeq, NGSPERL, QC3, scRNABatchQC, scMRMA, and TIGER, plus the Immu-Mela portal. 

Quanhu "Tiger" Sheng (front right) with director of atherosclerosis research MacRae Linton, senior staff scientist Danielle Michell, associate professor Kasey Vickers, and former research instructor Ryan Allen (now an UAMS assistant professor). This portrait was taken in 2019, when the team received a $1 million grant from the Keck Foundation to target vascular inflammation. Photo: Susan Urmy / Vanderbilt University Medical Center

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Tess Stopczynski to senior biostatistician. A graduate of the University of Vermont's MS program in statistics, Stopczynski's research interests include infectious diseases, survival analysis, categorical data analysis, and trials design. Her publications include peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Hospital Pediatrics, Clinical Cancer Research, and Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. View her profile for links to each article. Outside of work, Stopczynski is an avid reader and runner. 

Tess Stopczynski (left) and biostatistician Trey McGonigle chat during a department reception, 2023

Benjamin French, PhD, professor of biostatistics and director of graduate studies, has been elected to the National Council for Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) for a six-year term. Chartered by Congress in 1964, the NCRP provides scientific analysis, information, and recommendations concerning radiation protection, and its council consists of one hundred leading scientists. Dr. French joined the NCRP's program area committee on Basic Criteria, Epidemiology, Radiobiology, and Risk in Fall 2023. He serves as an expert advisor to the Department of Statistics at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation and contact PI of the R01-funded "Optimizing the implementation of personalized risk-prediction models for venous thromboembolism among hospitalized adults" study; he was also PI of "Evaluation of time-dependent covariates in radiation dose-response models in the Million Person Study," supported by Oak Ridge Associated Universities and is co-investigator of the NASA-sponsored "Evaluation of dementia and cognitive tests among workers exposed to low-LET radiation." He joined the department in 2020.

Congratulations to Dr. French! 

Congratulations to associate professor and associate vice chair of equity, diversity, and inclusion Mario Davidson on the publication of Evaluating the Role of Competency-Based Behavioral Interviewing in Holistic Medical School Admissions, published online ahead of print today in Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Dr. Davidson and his colleagues investigated the role of behavioral interviews in admission decisions and whether they help "reduce bias related to over-reliance on standardized metrics."