On April 14, Ph.D. student Zhe Sun successfully defended her thesis entitled “On Statistical Modeling of Longitudinal Compositional Data with Applications in a Preterm Infant Study”. The defense took place online via WebEx and was attended by more than thirty students and faculty members. Zhe’s committee consists of Drs. Kun Chen, Ming-Hui Chen, and Zhiyi Chi. Thank you all for your support.
Congratulations, Dr. Sun!
Dr. Chongliang Luo will join Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor in fall 2021. Congratulations!
Chongliang is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from UConn with a Ph.D. in Statistics in 2017. His research interests focus on statistical methodology on data integration, including multi-view data integration, statistical methods on meta-analysis and privacy-preserving distributed statistical learning.
Applications are invited for a postdoctoral associate position under the mentorship of Dr. Kun Chen (https://kun-chen.uconn.edu). This position is open immediately until filled, with an anticipated start date in Spring 2021. The initial appointment is for one year with an expected appointment length of 2-3 years upon satisfactory performance and funding availability.
This position involves primarily NIH-funded statistical and machine learning research in the following directions:
Statistical theory and methodology for data integration and data fusion.
Statistical theory and methodology for transfer learning.
Statistical and machine learning methods for building risk prediction models for rare events, in particular, suicide and mental health related outcomes, with large-scale EHR and medical claims data.
Please apply at https://jobs.hr.uconn.edu/cw/en-us/job/494932/postdoctoral-research-associate.
Our work on suicide identification and prevention is reported on UConn Today:
UConn Researchers Leveraging CT Health Data to Develop Suicide Risk Algorithms
GA and Post-doc positions are available in Chen’s research group. If interested please contact Chen at kun.chen@uconn.edu.
Our project on developing suicide risk algorithms for diverse clinical settings using data fusion (R01-MH124740) is awarded by NIH. This is a four-year multi-PI R01 grant starting from September 2020, led by Dr. Robert Aseltine from UCHC, Dr. Kun Chen from UConn, and Dr. Fei Wang from Cornell Medicine. We propose to use data from a large multistate health information exchange, integrated with hospital data from the State of Connecticut, to develop and test suicide risk algorithms using principles associated with statistical data fusion and transfer learning.
Please inquire Dr. Kun Chen at kun.chen@uconn.edu for possible Post-Doc and graduate assistantship opportunities.
On April 6, Ph.D. student Xiaokang Liu successfully defended her thesis entitled “Integrative Multivariate Learning via Composite Low-Rank Decompositions”. The defense took place online via WebEx and was attended by more than twenty students and faculty members. Xiaokang’s committee consists of Drs. Kun Chen, Ming-Hui Chen, Dipak Dey, and Yuwen Gu. Thank you all for your support.
Xiaokang will join UPenn Biostatistics as a Post-Doc in July.
Congratulations, Dr. Liu!
Ph.D. student Zhe Sun won the 2020 ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Award and the most prestigious John van Ryzin Award for Best Paper! The awards recognize her paper entitled “Sparse Log-Contrast Regression with Functional Compositional Predictors: Linking Gut Microbiome Trajectory in Early Postnatal Period to Neurobehavioral Development of Preterm Infants”, co-authored by Zhe Sun, Wanli Xu, Xiaomei Cong, Gen Li, and Kun Chen.
Congratulations, Zhe!
Ph.D. student Yan Li won the 2020 ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Award! He is co-advised by Dr. Kun Chen and Dr. Jun Yan. The award recognizes his paper entitled “Pursuing Sources of Heterogeneity in Mixture Regression”, co-authored by Yan Li, Chun Yu, Yize Zhao, Robert Aseltine, Weixin Yao, and Kun Chen.
Congratulations, Yan!
The Interdisciplinary CLAS pilot grant program has decided to fund our proposal “Understanding Community‐ and Individual-Level Factors underlying Firearm Violence in America: Focus on the State of Connecticut.” This interdisciplinary project is led by Dr. Mary Bernstein from Sociology, Dr. Blair Johnson from Psychological Sciences, and Dr. Kun Chen from Statistics.