Peihua Qiu is a professor and the founding chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. He received his PhD in statistics from the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1996. He then worked as a senior research consulting statistician for the Biostatistics Center at the Ohio State University during 1996-1998, and as an Assistant Professor (1998-2002), Associate Professor (2002-2007), and Full Professor (2007-2013) of the School of Statistics at the University of Minnesota during 1998-2013. Qiu has made substantial contributions in the research areas of jump regression analysis, image processing, statistical process control, survival analysis, dynamic disease screening, and spatio-temporal disease surveillance. So far, he has published two research monographs and over 135 research papers in refereed journals in these areas. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He served as associate editor for a number of top statistical journals, including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrics, and Technometrics. He was the editor of the flagship statistical journal Technometrics during 2014-2016.

Babette Brumback, Ph.D., is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. Her statistical research has concentrated on methods for longitudinal data analysis, causal modeling, bias adjustment, and analysis of data from complex sampling designs. She has also collaborated extensively on public health and medical studies concerning a broad array of research areas. Her professional activities include serving in 2014-2016 as Chair Elect, Chair, and Past Chair of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Epidemiology, serving in 2015—2016 as President of the Florida Chapter of the American Statistical Association, serving from 2011-2015 as a member of the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Clinical and Integrative Cardiovascular Sciences, and serving in 2016-2017 on an Advisory Panel for the MMS Program of the National Science Foundation. She has also served as Associate Editor of Biometrics and as Statistical Editor of Psychosomatic Medicine. Dr. Brumback received her PhD in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, followed by postdoctoral training in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1996-1999. She is an elected member of Delta Omega and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Somnath Datta received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in statistics from Indian Statistical Institute followed by a doctoral degree in Statistics and Probability from Michigan State University. He joined the Department of Biostatistics at University of Florida as a tenured full professor in July of 2015 under the preeminence initiative. Prior to that, he was Professor in the Statistics department at the University of Georgia and in the Bioinformatics & Biostatistics department at the University of Louisville. Over the years, he has published over one hundred and sixty research papers in various peer reviewed Statistics & Biostatistics journals. He develops novel statistical methods for analyzing public health, dental and biomedical data. His collaborative research interests include bioinformatics, spinal cord injury research, plant pathology and informatics based materials science research. His research projects have been supported by grants from the US National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Security Agency. He is Elected Member of International Statistical Institute, Elected Fellow of American Statistical Association, and Elected Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He has served as a director of over 20 doctoral dissertation committees.

Professional Biography Susmita Datta has received her PhD degree in Statistics from the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA followed by a postdoctoral training in Biostatistics from the Emory University. She has joined the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida in 2015 with a Preeminent hire as a tenured Full Professor. Prior to that, she was a Distinguished Scholar and a Tenured Full Professor at the University of Louisville and at the Georgia State University as a tenured Associate Professor. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is one of the three elected members of the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA), elected RECOMB member of ENAR of Biometric Society and was the elected President of Cacus for Women in Statistics in 2013. Her research area includes Biostatistics and Bioinformatics/Computational Biology. Her research contributions spans all ‘omics’ related high dimensional data such as RNA-sequencing, Single Cell RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry data for proteiomics, lipidomics, metabolomics and good old microarray data. In addition to that, her computing laboratory is involved in methodological and software development in clustering and classification techniques, statistical issues in population biology, systems biology, survival analysis, multi-state models and big data analytics. She has published a book on “Statistical Analysis of Proteomics, Metabolomics, and Lipidomics Data Using Mass Spectrometry” by Springer. Dr. Datta is widely (>100) published in peer reviewed journals. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have continuously funded her work. Her constant involvement with Big and fat data made her interested in Data science. She has guided more than 47 students through their theses and dissertations. She promotes women in STEM fields.

Jonathan Fischer is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics. He has experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students in probability, statistics, data science, and computational biology. His research interests generally lie in the development and application of methods for use with high-throughput sequencing data, particularly the transcriptomic variety. Dr. Fischer earned his PhD in Statistics in 2018 from the University of California, Berkeley, and received a BS in Physics and Mathematics from the College of William & Mary in 2013.

Steven Foti is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Director of Graduate Studies. He received his PhD in Statistics Education in 2017 and his MS in Statistics in 2013, both from the University of Florida. Steven is originally from New York where he earned his BS in Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Physics from Clarkson University. He teaches Biostatistics courses in literacy, methods, and data visualization to graduate students in public health and medicine. His experience and interests are in statistics education, statistical literacy, and assessment.

I am an assistant professor in Department of Biostatistics, University of Florida. In terms of statistical methodology development, I am interested in omics data integration, high-dimensional data, Bayesian methods, and optimization. In terms of genetic epidemiology, I am interested in Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In terms of collaborative research, I am interested in bioinformatics, genomic data applications.

John Kairalla is a Research Associate Professor and Associate Program Director of the Children’s Oncology Group, Statistics and Data Center-Gainesville in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. He received his PhD in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His current research focus is in clinical trial design, development, monitoring, and analysis with applications in childhood cancer research with a focus on late phase pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) trials.

Dr. Ji-Hyun Lee is a Professor of Biostatistics at the Department of Biostatistics in the University of Florida as well as Director of the Division of Quantitative Sciences at the University of Florida Health Cancer Center (UFHCC). Her responsibility at the UFHCC is to provide strategic leadership and administrative direction for the integrated and rigorous research for the Cancer Center scientists. Dr. Lee earned her master’s degree and doctorate in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on design and conduct of clinical trials, cluster/group randomized trials, methods for repeated measurements, Bayesian approach, and Best Statistical practices. She has authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles, particularly focused on therapeutic cancer research, social behavior intervention development, and population sciences in the health disparity field. As a lead statistician, she has served on or directed several Biostatistical Cores in large programmatic grants including SPORE, P30, and P50. Dr. Lee is an elected American Statistical Association (ASA) Fellow and a certified professional statistician through the ASA (PStat®). She serves the scientific review and monitoring committee for the UFHCC.

Dr. Zhigang Li is an associated professor in the Department of Biostatistics at University of Florida. He joined the department as an associate professor in 2018 under the University preeminence initiative. His research interests include microbiome data analysis, mediation analysis, causal inference, high-dimensional data analysis, longitudinal data analysis, survival analysis, joint modeling of longitudinal data and survival in palliative care research. Dr. Li has been PI of multiple NIH grants including his ongoing R01 project “Mediation analysis methods for modeling human microbiome mediating disease-leading causal pathways in children”. Dr. Li loves collaboration with colleagues. He has many years of experience on collaborating with epidemiologists, children’s health experts, environmental health scientists, pediatricians, palliative care researchers, cancer researchers, psychologists, physicians, engineers, neurologists, radiologists, etc.

Dr. Lou is a Research Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, the University of Florida and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Dr. Lou earned his Ph.D. in of Statistical Genetics and Bioinformatics from Zhejiang University, China, in 1997. And then he was recruited as an Assistant Professor at Zhejiang University. He came to the U.S. for pursuing postdoctoral training in the Department of Statistics, the University of Florida, in 2002. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Tulane University, and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and a Professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Dr. Lu’s research interests are primarily in statistical genetics and statistical learning. One area of research is to develop statistical learning methods (e.g., tree and deep learning) for designing and evaluating risk prediction models. In parallel with statistical learning research, he is also interested in developing and applying new statistical methods (e.g., U-statistic) for genetic association analysis and risk prediction analysis. In addition to developing new statistical methods and software, he collaborates with other researchers to investigate various biomedical and public health research questions.

Dr. Arlene Naranjo is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Associate Program Director of the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) Statistics & Data Center (SDC) at the University of Florida. As lead statistician for neuroblastoma with the COG SDC, Dr. Naranjo is responsible for designing future studies, performing sample size and power calculations, monitoring open studies, and analyzing results from pediatric clinical trials. Her research interests include clinical trials design & analysis, survival analysis, longitudinal data analysis, and hierarchical linear models. Dr. Naranjo helped develop and currently co-teaches the graduate-level course Design and Conduct of Clinical Trials.

Robert Parker is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistic. He received his PHD in Statistics in 2017 from the University of Florida, his MS in Mathematics from Mississippi State University in 2012, and his BS in Mathematics from Millsaps College. Robert teach Biostatistics courses to both undergraduate and graduate students in public health and medicine. His research interests lie mainly in the areas of probability theory, Bayesian methods, and statistical methods for analyzing non-Euclidean data.

My research interests include clinical trials design & analysis, survival analysis, machine learning and Bayesian methodology. I am current the leader statistician for Hodgkin Lymphoma committee in Children’s Oncology Group (COG) Statistics & Data Center (SDC) at the University of Florida.

I am an assistant professor in Department of Biostatistics, University of Florida after my tenure as Postdoctoral associate at Duke University. My primary focus is on data science and in developing innovative statistical modeling frameworks and corresponding inference methodology motivated by complex applications with strong theoretical support. I received my PhD from NC State.

I am interested to develop cool statistical methods with substantial theoretical support in non-parametric/High dimensional modeling, Machine learning, manifold learning, graphical modeling, complex structure learning motivated by a variety of applications for example brain imaging, nutritional epidemiology, genomics, image precessing, time-series analysis etc, please feel free to contact me. Since most of my works are in Bayes paradigm, it is also often of great interest to develop flexible prior distributions to study complex spaces with theoretical support and develop computational algorithms that are scalable and highly efficient.

Dr. Wu is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Biostatistics at University of Florida. He obtained BS degree from Peking University in 1989, MS degree from Nankai University in 1992, and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1998. Dr. Wu serves as Director of UF CTSI Research Design and Data Coordinating Center. He has served as Director of Biostatistics Core at the VA Rehabilitation Outcome Research Center (2002-2012), the VA Brain Rehabilitation Research Center (2002-2014) and the UF Claude D. Pepper Older American Independence Center (2013-2018).

Dr. Wei Xue is a Research Assistant Professor with the biostatistics department with a shared research assignment. She is a valuable member of the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), the world’s largest NIH/NCI sponsored clinical trials organization devoted exclusively to childhood and adolescent cancer research. Dr. Xue is the lead statistician on Soft Tissue Sarcoma (STS) Committees. She provides statistical support in all aspects of COG clinical trials in STS area by developing protocols, monitoring ongoing trials, conducting statistical analysis, and reporting and uploading research documents. Additionally, she is a member of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) group. A team of researchers who provide a central location for investigators to seek research design and analysis support through the UF Clinical and Translational science Institute (CTSI).