NextGen: About Us

Wei Zhong

Vice President for NextGen

Wei Zhong is currently Director of Biostatistics at Pfizer Inc with over 10 years industry experience on drug development. He received his PhD in biostatistics from University of Minnesota, and then worked for Genentech and Takeda before joining Pfizer in 2018.

Moinak Bhaduri

Bentley University

Moinak is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Bentley University. He studies change detection problems in Poisson processes.

Xiaohan Guo

Pfizer

Xiaohan Guo is a Manger of Biostatistics from Pfizer. He joined Pfizer in 2022 and before that he graduated from The Ohio State University. His research interest lies in clinical trial design, precision medicine, and functional data analysis.

Sana Gupta

University of Connecticut

Sana is a senior Statistics major and Mathematics minor at the University of Connecticut Honors Program. She is interested in statistical applications in the pharmaceutical industry and has interned at Pfizer in Groton, CT. She is currently an IDEA Grant recipient at UConn, working on a research project about the imputation of compositional missing data.

Min Lin

University of Connecticut

Min Lin is currently a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. His research is focused on leveraging external data for a current clinical trial. He also has an M.S. in Biostatistics from the University of Connecticut.

Xin Liu

Ohio State University

Xin Liu is a biostatistics Ph.D. candidate at the School of Public Health, The Ohio State University. His work involves efficient MCMC and Bayesian data augmentation for complex clinical data and clinical trial design and support.

Austin Menger

University of Connecticut

Austin is currently a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. His research is focused on Survival Analysis, Bayesian Statistical Methodology, Machine Learning, and Longitudinal Data Analysis. Prior to coming to Connecticut, he was the Lead Data Scientist at New York Engineers. Upon completing his degree at UConn, Austin will pursue an entrepreneurial career path continuing to grow his analytics startup company. He has a B.S. with honors in Mathematics from Georgetown University, and an M.S. in Applied Analytics from Columbia University.

Shaoyang Ning

Williams College

Shaoyang Ning is an Assistant Professor in Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Williams College. His research focuses on the study and design of statistical methods for integrative data analysis, in particular, innovating statistical methods that efficiently integrate multi-source, multi-resolution, large-scale data to solve real-life problems. Instances include tracking localized influenza with Google search data and predicting cancer-targeting drugs with high-throughput genetic profiling data.

Anna Plantinga

Williams College

Anna Plantinga is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Williams College. Her research focuses on statistical methods for human microbiome and other omics data. Prior to joining Williams, Anna received her B.S., double majoring in mathematics and biology, from Calvin College (now Calvin University) and her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Washington.

Gaurav Sharma

Takeda

Dr. Gaurav Sharma has 12 years of experience in design and analysis of Phase I-IV studies (including adaptive and innovative clinical trial designs) in various therapeutic areas including rare disease, plasma derived therapies, substance abuse and pediatrics. Currently, he is working in the role of Director, Statistics at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, previously he has worked at Emmes Company. He received his PhD in Statistics, focusing on mixed effects models and higher order asymptotics from University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Yulia Sidi

Merck

Yulia has over 7 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Currently, Yulia works as Principal Scientist in Merck, where she provides support to late development oncology clinical trials. She holds a PhD in Statistics from University of Connecticut.

Neil Spencer

University of Connecticut

Neil Spencer is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at University of Connecticut. His research areas include Bayesian inference, forensic statistics, and network science. Prior to his position at University of Connecticut, Neil received a Bachelors degree at Acadia University, a Masters degree at University of British Columbia, a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, and was postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

Elizabeth Upton

Williams College

Elizabeth Upton is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Williams College. Her research focuses on the analysis of network-indexed data. She obtained her PhD at Boston University in 2019 and her EdM at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2011.

Gregory Vaughan

Bentley University

Gregory Vaughan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Bentley University where he teaches statistics and analytics. His methodological research focuses on statistical learning and high-dimensional statistics. He also collaborates with other researchers in a variety of fields including suicide prevention, the interface of business and biotech, and education. Greg received his B.S., double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science, from Trinity College and his PhD in Statistics from the University of Connecticut.

Jing Wu

University of Rhode Island

Dr. Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Rhode Island.

Iris Yan

Amity Regional High School

Iris is a high schooler at Amity Regional High School, CT. She is passionate about serving the community and inspiring an interest in statistics and data science among the next generation. At school, she is on the math team and volunteers in the Leo club. She has conducted projects in creating machine learning algorithms to predict geomagnetic storms and identify patterns in tissue images for cancer diagnosis.

Zhan (Harold) Ye

Pfizer

Dr. Zhan (Harold) Ye is currently the associate director of non-clinical biostatistician at Pfizer Inc. for Digital Genomics Precision Medicine Statistics. He received his PhD in Mathematics, focusing on statistical genetics from Michigan Technological University, and then worked as senior biostatistician for Marshfield Clinical Research Foundation before joining Pfizer in 2017.

Katherine Zavez

University of Connecticut

Katherine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. Her research is focused on missing data, and she has a B.A. in Mathematics and Statistics from Swarthmore College.

Yichi Zhang

University of Rhode Island

Yichi Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at University of Rhode Island. He received his PhD in statistics from North Carolina State University. His research interests include precision medicine, causal inference and statistical learning. More details can be found at https://web.uri.edu/cs/meet/yichi-zhang/.

Abidemi K. Adeniji

Past Vice President for NextGen

Dr. Adeniji is a statistical science consultant at M-Estimator.

Shaun Bender

Boehringer Ingelheim

Nishita Bhattacharya

Nishita is a Data Scientist and has been working in the Insurance Industry for Munich Re since 2017 after completing graduate studies in Statistics and Biostatistics from Rutgers University.

Jessi Cisewski-Kehe

Yale University

Jessi Cisewski-Kehe is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University.

Maria Gargiulo

Yale University

Maria Gargiulo is an undergraduate student at Yale University pursuing a B.S. in Statistics & Data Science and Spanish.

David Keller

Pfizer

Yang Liu

Yang Liu is a data scientist at Upstart Network, Inc.

Fernanda Maciel

Bentley University

Fernanda is a PhD candidate in Business with focus in Business Analytics at Bentley University.

Katy McKeough

Harvard University

Katy is a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. She is a member of the Harvard Sports Analytics Lab and the CHASC Astrostatistics Collaboration.

Kshitiz Rakesh

Boehringer Ingelheim

Kshitiz studied Dental Surgery for 5 years in India and subsequently decided to pursue MPH – Biostatistics from University of North Texas. After graduating, he worked at Boston Children’s Hospital for a year. Since June 2017 he has been working at Boehringer Ingelheim as a Statistical Programmer.

Dooti Roy

Boehringer Ingelheim

Dooti Roy, Ph.D., is a people leader, a global capability area owner and a senior principal methodology statistician at Boehringer Ingelheim and an adjunct faculty at UConn.

HaiYing Wang

University of Connecticut

HaiYing Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New Hampshire from 2013 to 2017. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at the University of Missouri in 2013, and his M.S. from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Xiaofei (Susan) Wang

Yale University

Susan is a Lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University.

Yan Zhuang

Connecticut College

Yan Zhuang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Connecticut College. Her research mainly focuses on statistical inference, sampling strategies, and sequential analysis.