Blog

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Nicole Gunnison to senior business process manager, in effect as of September 1. A graduate of Milligan College (now Milligan University) in East Tennessee, with a bachelor's degree in psychology, Gunnison worked in finance, accounting, and non-profit administration before joining Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2018, first as an accounting clerk and then as a budget/accounting analyst specializing in post-award financial support (i.e., administrative management of grant-funded research projects) for multiple departments. In 2022, she became the department's business process manager, leading comprehensive HR support and effort management for faculty, staff, and trainees; with this promotion, she will shoulder additional responsibilities in areas such as immigration and other global support processes. Her expertise with Workday and other systems has been absolutely vital to department operations, and she has an abiding interest in public health, human rights, economic empowerment and poverty alleviation, and other humanitarian causes, which has included volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. 

Congratulations to research assistant professor Chih-Yuan Hsu (first author) and professors Qi Liu and Yu Shyr (corresponding authors) on the publication of A distribution-free and analytic method for power and sample size calculation in single-cell differential expression in Bioinformatics. The paper addresses potential deviations from true data distribution in power and sample size calculation by offering a new method, scPS, that "stands out by making no assumptions about the data distribution and considering cell-cell correlations within individual samples. scPS is a rapid and powerful approach for designing experiments in single-cell differential expression analysis." There are web versions of scPS's independent two-group comparison and paired-group comparison tools as well.

An illustration of sample sizes and cells per sample in aiming toward a power of .80. This is Figure 1.2-1 in the independent file set for the scPS package on GitHub.

Co-authors include senior associate Yuwei Zhu and biostatistician Cass Johnson.

Congratulations to research assistant professor Jing Wang, the 2024 winner of our department's Faculty Development Award. Her proposal was deemed the best in a field of highly competitive submissions for a one-year pilot grant. Dr. Wang will use this funding to support an investigation that she hopes to build into a larger project: “Taking advantage of the dramatically increasing number of single-cell transcriptomics and epigenomics studies, the project aims to develop cell-type-specific enhancer-mediated regulatory maps for functionally interpreting and prioritizing enhancer risk variants and causal genes.” Dr. Wang is shown here describing her project at the August 2024 faculty meeting, when the award was announced. Her accomplishments include first-authorship of a 2023 paper in Cancers (Basel) on small RNA profiling in human extracellular vesicles,

Congratulations to senior biostatistician Andrew Guide on first-authorship of "Balancing efficacy and computational burden: weighted mean, multiple imputation, and inverse probability weighting methods for item non-response in reliable scales," an article published in JAMIA: A Scholarly Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine on August 13. Co-authors include assistant in biostatistics Shawn Garbett, senior biostatistician Xiaoke (Sarah) Feng, and professor Qingxia (Cindy) Chen, who is the paper's corresponding author, with colleagues in VICTR, DBMI, and Ohio State's Department of Internal Medicine. The study examined ways of interpreting non-responses to the Physical Activity Neighborhood Environment Scale (PANES) in the All of Us  survey and to what degree computationally intensive approaches are advisable. In the words of Guide and his co-authors, their goal is "to inform researchers on considerations for handling incomplete data in participant surveys, utilize the data received as efficiently and accurately as possible, and better understand how to use surveys with missingness to conduct accurate research." Guide, Garbett, Chen, and some other team members published another paper on interpreting All of Us data earlier this year; Guide, Garbett, and Feng also served as teaching asistants in this year's Summer Institute short course on the All of Us research program.

Figure 1 in Guide et al., "Balancing efficacy..." For the full caption, view the figure at its journal page or within the full paper.

Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Jia Li, professor and chair Yu Shyr, and professor Qi Liu on the August 22 publication of Identification and multimodal characterization of a specialized epithelial cell type associated with Crohn’s disease (CD) in Nature Communications. Dr. Li is first author of the paper and Dr. Liu its corresponding author. The team's study of terminal ileum and ascending colon (LND) cells in CD patients has led to findings that "suggest a potential pathogenic role" for such cells in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). 

Figure 1 from the paper. Visit it at the publication site for the full caption.

We are delighted to welcome two Taiwanese scholars to our department as visiting researchers: student Jo-Ying Hung and professor Kuo-Jung Lee, both based at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), a public research institution in Tainan. 

Jo-Ying Hung is a PhD candidate in statistics at NCKU, where she previously earned her BBA and MS degrees. She is formally a visiting student observer who is working with professor Yu Shyr from August 1, 2024, through February 28, 2025, to explore meta-regression techniques for analyzing estimated odds rations and hazard ratios in clinical research and learn about developing, using, and improving advanced statistical methods, tools, and repositories for biomedical research with attention to RNA sequencing, omics, and other key areas of investigation. She has co-authored peer-reviewed papers published in Cardiovascular Diabetology, American Journal of Occupational Therapy, World Neurosurgery, and Scientific Reports, and won an Outstanding Doctoral Student Scholarship at NCKU.

Kuo-Jung Lee is director of the Institutional Research Division at NCKU, as well as a professor in its Department of Statistics and Institute of Data Science. His sabbatical in Nashville is made possible in part by a Senior Fulbright Research Grant. He earned his PhD in statistics at the University of Minnesota, won NCKU's Excellent Teacher Award in 2020, and was most recently first author of papers appearing in Statistics in Medicine and Nanomaterials (Basel). During his visiting scholar appointment, which runs through July 31, 2025, Dr. Lee will work on "Bayesian Feature Selection and Spatio-Temporal Joint Modeling to the Integration of Radiomics and Multiplatform Genomic Data."

Professor Jonathan Schildcrout and associate professor Ran Tao are on this team, along with the analysts and app developers in our department who work closely with BioVU.