We are excited to welcome Qingyan Xiang, PhD, to Vanderbilt University Medical Center as an assistant professor of biostatistics, effective October 1. Dr. Xiang earned his doctorate in biostatistics at Boston University, with Judith Lok and Paola Sebastiani as his advisors, with earlier degrees from Zhejiang University (BE, food science and engineering) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (MS, statistics).

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Nicole Gunnison to senior business process manager, in effect as of September 1.

Congratulations to research assistant professor Chih-Yuan Hsu (first author) and professors Qi Liu and Yu Shyr (corresponding authors) on the publication of A distribution-free and analytic method for power and sample size calculation in single-cell differential expression in Bioinformatics.

Co-authors include senior associate Yuwei Zhu and biostatistician Cass Johnson.

Congratulations to research assistant professor Jing Wang, the 2024 winner of our department's Faculty Development Award. Her proposal was deemed the best in a field of highly competitive submissions for a one-year pilot grant. Dr.

Congratulations to senior biostatistician Andrew Guide on first-authorship of "Balancing efficacy and computational burden: weighted mean, multiple imputation, and inverse probability weighting methods for item non-response in reliable scales," an article published in JAMIA: A Scholarly Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine on August 13.

Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Jia Li, professor and chair Yu Shyr, and professor Qi Liu on the August 22 publication of Identification and multimodal characterization of a specialized epithelial cell type associated with Crohn’s disease (CD) in Nature Communications. Dr. Li is first author of the paper and Dr. Liu its corresponding author.

We are delighted to welcome two Taiwanese scholars to our department as visiting researchers: student Jo-Ying Hung and professor Kuo-Jung Lee, both based at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), a public research institution in Tainan.