Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Long Research Group

News and Events

2024

  • Dr. Sandra Safo, a former postdoc in our group, is selected to receive the prestigious 2024 COPSS Emerging Leader Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). Congratulations, Sandra!
  • Wenrui Li, PhD, will join the University of Connecticut as an Assistant Professor in July 2024. Congratulations, Wenrui!
  • Qiyiwen Zhang, PhD, will join the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor in July 2024. Congratulations, Qiyiwen!
  • Sewon Park, a former undergraduate student in CS in our group, is accepted into several prestigious law schools including Penn, Columbia University, and Cornell University. Congratulations, Sewon!
  • Kan Chen, a former phd student in our group, has been selected to receive an Institute of Mathematical Statistics New Researcher Travel Award to attend 2024 Joint Statistical Meetings. Congratulations, Kan!
  • Ryan Liu, a current undergraduate student in our group, received an offer to work as an immunological bioinformatics researcher at the NIH in Dr. Warren Leonard’s lab in this summer. Congratulations, Ryan!

2023​​

  • Nilanjana Chakraborty, PhD, will join the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur as an Assistant Professor in Department of Operations Management, Quantitative Methods and Information Systems in February, 2024. Congratulations, Nilanjana!
  • Kan Chen successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, entitled “Mitigating Bias From Unobserved or Residual Confounding in Observational Studies” on November 27, 2023. He will join Dr. Xihong Lin’s lab at Harvard as a postdoc in January, 2024. Congratulations, Dr. Chen!
  • Zongyu Dai successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, entitled “Advancing Deep Generative Imputation Models for Complex Incomplete data” on November 29, 2023. He will join Meta as Machine Learning Engineer in December, 2023. Congratulations, Dr. Dai!
  • Zhuoping Zhou won the Best Paper Award at ACM BCB 2023, for her paper entitled “Multi-Group Tensor Canonical Correlation Analysis.” Congratulations, Zhuoping!
  • Emily Getzen won the Best Poster Award at the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI) and the Graduate Group in Genomics and Computational Biology (GCB) Joint Retreat, for her poster entitled “An Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Multi-modal and Multi-visit EHRs.” Congratulations, Emily!
  • Our group received a new U01 grant from the NIH/NCI, entitled “Robust privacy preserving distributed analysis platform for cancer research: addressing data bias and disparities.” This grant enables us to continue our research on developing responsible, robust federated learning methods and software tools to advance equitable medicine.
  • Emily Getzen was awarded the 2023 Gertrude M. Cox Scholarship from the American Statistical Association. Congratulations, Emily!
  • Emily Getzen received the 2023 Biopharmaceutical Section Scholarship Award from the American Statistical Association. Congratulations, Emily!
  • Three masters students will start their PhD training in the fall of 2023. Kosta Tsingas will join the PhD program in Biostatistics at Penn. Qishuo Yin will join the PhD program in Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) at Princeton. Yuxuan Lin will join the PhD program in Statistics at Penn Wharton. Congratulations, Kosta, Qishuo and Yuxuan!
  • Yiliang Zhang successfully defended his phd dissertation, entitled “advancing robust and fair machine learning models for incomplete data,” on April 11, 2023. Yiliang will join DRW Holdings, LLC as Quantitative Researcher. Congratulations, Dr. Zhang!
  • Our lab and Dr. Mayur Naik’s lab in computer science partnered to form a team, Team Penn, to participate in the NIH Long COVID Computational Challenge (L3C). Zongyu Dai and Emily Getzen from our lab are members of this team. Team Penn won the Honorable Mention in this challenge. Congratulations to Emily and Zongyu and to Team Penn!
  • Emily Getzen won the 2023 Exceptional Achievement Award for Graduate Students from the American Statistical Association Philadelphia Chapter. Congratulations, Emily!
  • Emily Getzen's paper, Mining for Equitable Health: Assessing the Impact of Missing Data in Electronic Health Records, is highlighted by the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn. Congratulations, Emily!
  • Kan Chen won a Young Investigator Award from the Section on Statistics in Epidemiology of the ASA and will present his work at JSM 2023. Congratulations, Kan!
  • Jingxuan Bao was selected as the First Place winner of the student paper competition by the Statistics in Imaging Section of the ASA and will present his work at JSM 2023. Congratulations, Jingxuan!
  • Ryan Liu, a high school student research intern in our group in the summer of 2022, is admitted to Penn’s undergraduate class of 2027. He plans to pursue a double Major in Health and Societies (Concentrating in Health Care Markets and Finance) + Philosophy Politics & Economics on a pre-law or pre-medicine pathway. Congratulations, Ryan!

2022​​

  • Changgee Chang, PhD, will joint the Indiana University School of Medicine as an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science in March, 2023. Congratulations, Changgee!
  • Emily Getzen, Director of Equity and Access of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly (GAPSA) at Penn, was instrumental to GAPSA’s successful effort in working with the Provost’s office to raise the minimum Ph.D. stipend to $38,000, the largest one-time increase in Penn’s history; read more here. Congratulations to Emily (and others at the GAPSA) for the job well done!
  • Qi Long was selected to serve on the Steering Committee of the AAAS Section U (Statistics)   with a term in 2023-2024.
  • Sandra Safo, a former member of our group, was elected to serve on the Regional Committee (RECOM) of the IBS ENAR. Congratulations, Sandra!
  • Emily Getzen won the Best Poster Award at the Second Penn Conference on Big Data in Biomedical and Population Health Sciences in September, 2022. Congratulations, Emily!
  • Qi Long and Dr. Nicola Mason at Penn Vet received another five-year funding for the Pre-medical Cancer Immunotherapy Network for Canine Trials (PRECINCT) to advance next-generation immunotherapies for pet dogs and humans for another five years; read more here.
  • Chong Jin, PhD, will join the New Jersey Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences in September, 2022. Congratulations, Chong!
  • Kan Chen won the Jiann-Ping Hsu Pharmaceutical and Regulatory Sciences Student Paper Award from the International Chinese Statistical Association for his paper entitled "Covariate-Balancing-Aware Interpretable Deep Learning models for Treatment Effect Estimation."  Congratulations, Kan!  
  • Gary Hettinger earned his masters degree in Biostatistics in May, 2022. Congratulations, Gary!
  • Sandra Safo, Ming Wang and Yize Zhao, three former members of our group, were named Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. Congratulations to all!
  • Yize Zhao, a former group member, is promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Yale and is appointed an associate editor for Biometrics in June, 2022. Congratulations, Yize!
  • Ming Wang, a former group member, will move to the Case Western Reserve University as an associate professor and Director of Masters Program in Biostatistics in August, 2022. Congratulations, Ming!

2021​​

  • Zhiqi (Woody) Bu successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled “ALGORITHMIC ANALYSIS AND STATISTICAL INFERENCE OF SPARSE MODELS IN HIGH DIMENSION” on November 22, 2021. He will continue his research in differential privacy and other areas of trustworthy AI as Research Scientist at Amazon AWS AI, starting in Feb, 2022. Congratulations, Dr. Bu!
  • Qi Long was elected Treasurer of the Eastern North American Region (ENAR) of the International Biometric Society (IBS) with a term in 2022-2023.
  • Dr. Sandra Safo, a former postdoc in our group, is awarded a five-year R35 grant from NIH, entitled “Statistical and Machine Learning Methods to Address Biomedical Challenges for Integrating Multi-view Data” in September, 2021. Congratulations, Sandra!
  • Cong Fang will join Peking University as an assistant professor in August, 2021. Congratulations, Cong!
  • Dr. Yize Zhao, a former phd student in our group, is awarded a five-year R01/RF1 grant from NIH, entitled “Novel integrative imaging genetics analysis for Alzheimer's disease risk and progression” in May, 2021. In addition, she served as Associate Program Chair for the successful 2021 ENAR Spring Meeting. Congratulations, Yize!
  • Ming Wang, a former group member, is appointed an Associate Editor for Biometrics in June, 2021. Congratulations, Ming!
  • Emily Getzen won the Best Flash Talk Award in Biostatistics at the Third DBEI/CCEB Research Day on March 24, 2021. Congratulations, Emily!
  • Our group received a five-year R01 grant from the NIH, entitled “Statistical Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Progression Integrating Brain Imaging and -Omics Data,” joint work with Dr. Suprateek Kundu.
  • Qinqing Zheng joined the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in Feb, 2021. Congratulations, Qinqing!

2020​​​​​

  • Qi Long is elected a fellow of the AAAS in November, 2020; read more here.
  • Our paper “Privacy-Preserving Methods for Vertically Partitioned Incomplete Data” received the Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2020 Annual Symposium. This work was led by Yi Deng, a former member of our group. Congratulations, Yi!
  • Ziyi Li, a former group member, joins the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center as Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in November, 2020. Congratulations, Ziyi!
  • Domonique Hodge, a former phd student in our group, joined Microsoft as a Delivery Data Scientist in November, 2020 and she is very excited about this new opportunity. Congratulations, Domonique!
  • Eun Jeong Min joined the College of Medicine at the Catholic University of Korea as Assistant Professor in September, 2020. Congratulations, EJ!
  • Yiliang Zhang won the Student Paper Award from the Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS) Section of the American Statistical Association for his paper entitled “High-Dimensional Nonparametric Density Estimation via Max-Random Forest”. Congratulations, Yiliang!

2019

  • Our group received a five-year R01/RF1 grant from the NIH, entitled “Advancing Analysis of Multi-omics Data in Alzheimer's Disease Research.”
  • Wenli Sun successfully defended her doctoral dissertation entitled “Knowledge-guided Bayesian Support Vector Machine Methods for High-Dimensional Data” on September 27, 2019. Congratulations, Dr. Sun!
  • Wenli Sun received the Best Flash Talk Award at DBEI/CCEB Research Day 2019. Congratulations, Wenli! 

2018

  • Wenli Sun received the Best Student Poster Award at the 2018 GSK Quantitative Sciences Annual Conference. Congratulations, Wenli!
  • Ziyi Li received the Pinina and Michael Haber Award, given to the student who completed her/his PH.D. degree in the fewest number of months in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory. Congratulations, Ziyi!
  • Ziyi Li received the ENAR Poster Award at the 2018 ENAR Spring Meeting. Congratulations, Ziyi!
  • Ziyi Li successfully defended her doctoral dissertation entitled “Statistical Learning methods for Big Biomedical Data” on February 26, 2018. Congratulations, Dr. Li!

2017

  • Our group received a R01 grant from the NIH, entitled “Privacy-preserving methods and tools for handling missing data in distributed health data networks.”
  • Will Zhu successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled “Statistical Methods for Handling Missing Data in Functional Data Analysis” on December 8, 2017. Congratulations, Dr. Zhu!
  • Sandra E. Safo joined the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota as a tenure-track assistant professor in August, 2017. Congratulations, Sandra!
  • Yi Deng successfully defended his PhD dissertation on August 18, 2017 and will join Google as Data Scientist in September. Congratulations, Dr. Deng!
  • Yi Deng received the Jiann-Ping Hsu Pharmaceutical and Regulatory Sciences Student Paper Award at the 2017 International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) Applied Statistics Symposium, for his paper entitled “Privacy-Preserving Methods for Horizontally Partitioned Incomplete Data.” Congratulations, Yi!

2016

  • Our research group has moved to the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, as of November 1, 2016.
  • Domonique W. Hodge joins Gallup, Inc. as Data Scientist Consultant on October 1, 2016 after successfully defending her doctoral dissertation in September. Congratulations, Dr. Hodge!
  • Samantha M. Noreen was awarded the Livingston Fellowship by the Rollins School of Public Health. Funded by the trustees of the Livingston Foundation, this fellowship recognizes Samantha’s outstanding achievements as a doctoral student. Congratulations, Samantha!
  • Ziyi Li won the 2nd place prize award in the NSF/Anderson Student Poster Competition at the Southern Regional Council On Statistics (SRCOS) 2016 Summer Research Conference, for her paper entitled “Incorporating Biological Information in Sparse Principal Component Analysis with Application to Genomic Data.” Congratulations, Ziyi!
  • Ziyi Li received a student paper award at the 2016 International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) Applied Statistics Symposium, for her paper entitled “Incorporating Biological Information in Sparse Principal Component Analysis with Application to Genomic Data.” Congratulations, Ziyi!
  • Qi Long has been named an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
  • Ziyi Li was accepted into the 2016 summer internship program at the Integrating Data for Analysis, Anonymization and SHaring (iDASH) Center at the University of California, San Diego. It was a very competitive application process. Congratulations, Ziyi!
  • Yize Zhao, a former group member, joins the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Cornell as a tenure-track assistant professor on July 1, 2016. Congratulations, Yize!
  • Ming Wang, a former group member, won the 2016 Junior Faculty Presentation Award from the Association for Clinical and Translational Statisticians, for her paper with Qi Long entitled “Addressing issues associated with evaluating prediction models for survival endpoints based on the concordance statistic.” Congratulations Ming!
  • Yi Deng was on the winning team for the Atlanta Big Data Team Challenge on April 7, 2016 sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton and hosted by Emory RSPH. Congratulations, Yi!
  • Changgee Chang was awarded a Young Researcher Travel Grant to the ISBA 2016 World Meeting. Congratulations Changgee!
  • Samantha M. Noreen was awarded the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship in 2016-2017 by the Emory Laney Graduate School. Congratulations Samantha!
  • Domonique W. Hodge received a travel award to the 2016 Joint Statistical Meetings from the American Statistical Association Survey Research Methods Section. Congratulations Domonique!
  • Sandra E. Safo received an NIH-funded K12 award from the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) Program. Congratulations Sandra!

2015

  • Our group has organized a workshop series on handling missing data at the Georgia Department of Public Health in 2015-2016.
  • Qi Long has been named an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.
  • Our group received a collaborative research grant from the NSF, entitled “Advancing mHealth using Big Data Analytics: Statistical and Dynamical Systems Modeling of Real-Time Adaptive m-Intervention for Pain.”
  • Our group received a research grant from the NIH/NEI, entitled “Coordinating Center for Infant Aphakia Treatment Study (IATS).”
  • Qi Long received the Biostatistics Teaching Award at the Emory Rollins School of Public Health.
  • Domonique W. Hodge was selected to receive the SAS Fellowship in 2015-2016. Congratulations Domonique!
  • Yi Deng won the third place in the American Statistical Association Biopharmaceutical Section Poster Competition at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings, for his paper entitled “Bayesian modeling and prediction of patient accrual in multi-regional clinical trials.” Congratulations Yi!
  • Our group received a research grant from the NIH/NINDS, entitled “Statistical Methods for Causal Inference in Observational Studies.”

2014

  • Pallavi S. Mishra-Kalyani successfully defended her PhD dissertation and will join FDA as a mathematical statistician. Congratulations, Dr. Mishra-Kalyani!
  • Yize Zhao successfully defended her PhD dissertation and will join SAMSI/UNC as a postdoctoral fellow. Congratulations, Dr. Zhao!
  • Pallavi S. Mishra-Kalyani was named a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award and received a student travel award at the 2014 International Indian Statistical Association Conference, for her paper entitled “Propensity process: a balancing functional.” Congratulations Pallavi!
  • Pallavi S. Mishra-Kalyani won an Honorable Mention at the American Statistical Association Biopharmaceutical Section Student Paper Competition at the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings, , for her paper entitled “Propensity process: a balancing functional.” Congratulations Pallavi!
  • Pallavi S. Mishra-Kalyani received a travel award to the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings from the NSF. Congratulations Pallavi!
  • Yize Zhao received the David P. Byar Young Investigator Travel Award from the American Statistical Association Biometrics Section, for her paper entitled “Hierarchical feature selection incorporating known and novel biological information: Identifying genomic features related to prostate cancer recurrence.” Congratulations Yize!
  • Yize Zhao won a Student Paper Award from the American Statistical Association Statistical Learning and Data Mining Section (Declined), for her paper entitled “Bayesian multiresolution variable selection for ultra-high dimensional neuroimaging data.” Congratulations Yize!

2013

  • Our group received a research grant from the NIH/NCI, entitled “Feature Selection for Genomic Data Using Known and Novel Biological Information.”
  • Our group received a research award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, entitled “Statistical Methods for Missing Data in Large Observational Studies.”
  • Yize Zhao won a Student Paper Award from the American Statistical Association Section on Bayesian Statistical Science, for her paper entitled “Bayesian hierarchical feature selection of structured functional predictors measured with error.” Congratulations Yize!
  • Yize Zhao received an NSF travel award to the 9th Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics (Declined). Congratulations Yize!
  • Our group received a research grant from the NIH/NCI, entitled “Evaluating Prediction Models for Cancer Endpoints Subject to Dependent Censoring.”

2012

  • Yize Zhao was nominated by Emory University for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) International Student Research Fellowship. Congratulations Yize!
  • Yize Zhao received the Award for Best Performance in Ph.D. Qualifying Exams from the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory University. Congratulations Yize!
  • Ming Wang won the Young Investigator Award from American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Epidemiology, for her paper entitled “A conditional likelihood approach for regression analysis using biomarkers measured with batch-specific error.” Congratulations Ming!

2011

  • Ming Wang won the R.L. Anderson Award at the 2011 Southern Regional Council on Statistics (SRCOS) Summer Research Conference, for her paper entitled “A conditional likelihood approach for regression analysis using biomarkers measured with batch-specific error.” Congratulations Ming!