2015 research statement
200 Words | Approximately 1 Minutes Read | Last Modified on June 15, 2015
I am a postdoctoral scholar of the Stephens lab at The University of Chicago. My research focuses on data-driven development of novel statistical approaches to answer interesting questions in human genetics. Specifically I am interested in understanding the biology of gene regulation through integrated analyses of multiple types of human genetic data.
I am a statistician, computational biologist and human geneticist by training. Before joining the Stephens lab I was a PhD student in the Structural Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics program at Baylor College of Medicine under the supervision of Dr. Suzanne M. Leal, where I developed Variant Tools, Variant Association Tools and SEQLinkage for gene-mapping with next-generation sequencing data, as well as the SEQPower framework for study design and the VAT Stacking algorithm for rare variant association testing in whole-exome association studies, and contributed to the analysis of NHLBI Exome Sequencing Project. In the mean time I was a visiting PhD student at the Department of Statistics, Rice University. Before graduate school, I was an undergraduate research assistant for Dr. Jurg Ott at Beijing Institute of Genomics, where we developed a statistical method for gene-interaction analysis in genome-wide association studies.