Biostatistics Research Mentors
Faculty bios Heading link
Rashid Ahmed, PhD, associate dean for academic affairs, is an epidemiologist and biostatistician whose research interests include the development of statistical methods for the design of community-based interventions, the analysis of longitudinal data collected from studies of interventions designed to affect health behaviors, missing data and the design and analysis of observational studies of health behavior. His work has been funded by CancerCare Manitoba Foundation, Heart & Stroke Foundation, Health Canada and CIHR. His current research focuses on the cost-effectiveness of healthcare interventions. Faculty Profile
Saria Awadalla, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics, focuses on high-dimensional data, joint modeling of latent growth curves, causal inference and randomized intervention trials. His applied research examines exposure to environmental mixtures, predictive models of chronic post-surgical pain and randomized clinical trial of the effects of glucocorticoids on cognitive outcomes in HIV+ women. Globally, he is assisting Sudan’s National Public Health Lab with their efforts to conduct surveillance and statistical modeling of COVID-19 case data as well as that of other endemic diseases such as malaria and cholera. Faculty Profile
Sanjib Basu, PhD, Paul Levy and Virginia F. Tomasek Professor of Biostatistics, is the director of the biostatistics section. He is the co-director of the Population Health Analytics Metrics and Evaluation (PHAME) Center, providing a hub of advanced data visualization, evaluation, and analytics to community members, students, policy makers and researchers in the city of Chicago and beyond. Faculty Profile
Dulal Bhaumik, PhD, professor of biostatistics, focuses on environmental statistics, statistical problems in psychiatry, biostatistics, design of experiments and statistical inferences. Currently, he is investigating sample size determination and power computation for fMRI data. Bhaumik led global health surveillance of early data from numerous countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty Profile
Zhengjia (Nelson) Chen, PhD, associate professor of biostatistics, is completing methodology research on adaptive and sequential approaches for clinical trials. He develops corresponding user-friendly statistical software to facilitate these trial approaches. His other areas of research interest include bioinformatics, proteomics and microbiome data analysis. Faculty Profile
Sreenu Konda, PhD, adjunct clinical assistant professor of biostatistics, directs the MS in Big Data Health Analytics program. His research interests focus on time series and multivariate analysis, machine learning and collaboration with the UIC Cardiology Division. Faculty Profile
Li Liu, PhD, associate professor of biostatistics, serves as the ombudsperson for the UIC School of Public Health. Her research interests include longitudinal/multi-level data methodologies. She provides statistical support for cancer research across UIC and is a part of global health efforts with randomized longitudinal trials in Malawi on HIV prevention and prenatal care.
Hakan Demirtas, PhD, associate professor of biostatistics, is a research expert on missing data, multiple imputation, stochastic simulation, random number generation and biostatistical software development. Faculty Profile
Jiehuan Sun, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics, focuses his research efforts on high-dimensional data, genomics data and electronic health records data. Faculty Profile
Heng Wang, PhD, adjunct clinical assistant professor of biostatistics, focuses her research on Bayesian hierarchical models, hidden Markov models, statistical modeling and simulation, order restricted inference, high dimensional data, missing data analysis, multiple testing, statistical genomics and genetics and neuroimaging data analysis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she published studies examining the effects of healthcare worker burnout on an international scale. Faculty Profile
Hua Yun Chen, PhD, professor of biostatistics, conducts research focused on developing innovative statistical methods for analyzing complex health science data. His areas of expertise include statistical methods for analysis of data with missing values, for design and analysis of biased samples in epidemiological studies, and for identification of gene-environment interactions. His recent research work also covers methods for analysis of high-dimensional data with weak effects and for study of adverse health effects of exposures to mixture of environmental pollutants. Faculty Profile