I am an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
My research interest lies in the development and application of statistical methodology for high-dimensional data that are collected in biomedical and public health studies, particularly for application to problems in the emerging "omics" field, including genomics, epigenomics, metagenomics, etc. Currently one major focus of my work is on the analysis of metagenomics and microbiome data. In this area, I work on 1) developing better statistical approaches for charactering the microbial dysbiosis underlying human health and diseas, utilizing the structure and correaltion between taxa, 2) understanding the bias introduced through the experimental and analysis pipelines, and 3) developing statistical methods to characterize and correct for the bias, with the ultimate goal to acheive reproducible discovery integrating multiple microbiome datasets that may be produced through different pipelines. Another research interest lies in the understanding the immune-cell profiles and dynamics in cancer immunotherapy, using the cutting edge sequencing technology, including T-cell receptor sequencing and single cell RNA sequencings.
Collaborations with biomedical researchers form another essential part of my research program. I have broad scientific research interests in areas pertaining to cancer, environmental sciences, epidemiology and other biomedical and substantive disciplines.