PhD
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
UNC-Chapel Hill
Cancer Epidemiology Research Program
Area of Interest
I am an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at UNC-Chapel Hill. My research develops statistical and machine learning methods to understand complex biomedical data. I apply these tools to diverse modalities including genetics, genomics, medical imaging, and electronic health records, with a strong focus on cancer-related applications.
I have worked extensively on the Carolina Breast Cancer Study, applying geospatial and integrative models to analyze spatial heterogeneity in breast cancer risk and outcomes. In collaboration with UNC Lineberger member Melissa Troester, we have published work linking geospatial models to assess community-level healthcare access and its impact on breast cancer care timeliness.
I’ve done extensive work on spatial transcriptomics (ST) in cancer studies. I collaborate with UNC Lineberger member Gaorav Gupta to study spatial dynamics in breast cancer, developing statistical tools to detect tumor boundaries and identify “cliff genes” with sharp expression changes across tumor margins. In parallel, my team curated STimage1K4M, the largest publicly available ST-pathology dataset, with 1,149 slides and over 4 million image–gene expression pairs, including 600+ cancer-related slides that enable large-scale AI and statistical research.
I also develop interpretable dimension reduction techniques. With UNC Lineberger member Naim Rashid, we applied nonnegative matrix factorization to pancreatic cancer transcriptomic data to identify latent factors driving tumor subtypes.
Awards and Honors
- Inaugural IMS Lawrence D. Brown PhD Student Award, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2019
