Liao previously worked as a research analyst in VUMC’s Genetic Medicine division. He’s interested in biostatistics because he is really drawn to being able to help people through avenues in statistics and mathematics.

Additional projects:

• Harnessing Big Data to Arrest the HIV/HCV/Opioid Syndemic in the Rural and Urban South (Peter Rebeiro, supervisor; 2023–present)
• Developing Sigmoid Models for Alzheimer's Disease Progression (Dandan Liu, supervisor; 2022)

Honors include the Commodore Award in Biostatistics, 2023, "for enriching the department and graduate program through ingenuity, dedication, and altruism."

Activities include: Biostatistics Graduate Student Association treasurer, 2023; first-year liaison, 2022–2023

Over the course of three internships – one at Vanderbilt and two at Duke – Yazdani worked on a variety of projects, studying neurodevelopment in animals, cognitive diseases, electrophysiology, and the impacts of drugs. “Paternal THC Exposure in Rats Causes Long-Lasting Neurobehavioral Effects in the Offspring,” a paper on one of her projects at Duke, was published in the Neurotoxicology & Teratology Journal.

MS thesis abstract:

Ansa cervicalis stimulation (ACS) has been proposed as a treatment option for obstructive sleep apnea. Airflow, CPAP pressure, and ACS stimulation status were measured continuously during drug-induced sleep endoscopy. Data was divided into breaths and experimental variables were summarized across each breath. Airflow was summarized in three ways: Vimax, mean flow, and middle third mean flow. The treatment effects of ACS were ∆Pcrit and ∆Popen. ∆P is the difference in pressure between ACS and no stimulation required to reach set levels of airflow. Airflow is zero for ∆Pcrit and the average flow for non-flow limited breaths for ∆Popen. Breaths were divided into experimental conditions, which are a set of successive breaths a unique patient, nasal pressure and stimulation status. Current experimental protocol allows three breaths per experimental condition. ∆P estimates were compared via sampling first N breaths per experimental condition and a simulation of the same sampling method. ∆P estimates were also compared via bootstrap sampling the number of patients. For the breath sampling, ∆Pcrit sub-sample estimates approached the full-sample estimates at three breaths per experimental condition, while ∆Popen estimates did not. For the simulation, bias between the true ∆P and the simulated ∆P estimate decreased as number of breaths sampled increased. Some ∆P estimates (∆Popen for Vimax, ∆Pcrit for mean and middle third mean flow) do not plateau at the true ∆P, indicating bias in the ∆P calculation. Estimates tended to plateau at or before six breaths per condition. Standard error decreased as number of breaths sampled increased for the simulation, but standard error across flow measures stabilized by four breaths per condition for breath sampling. The number of patients needed to obtain stable estimates of ∆Pcrit and ∆Popen was small for Vimax and mean flow but greater for middle third mean flow. Because sampling three breaths per condition may yield biased estimates of ∆P, increasing the number of breaths per condition to six may be beneficial. Few patients were needed to obtain stable estimates of ∆P but increasing the number of patients decreased standard errors for all flow measures.

Research interests include: statistical modeling, causal inference, machine learning, R, data visualization