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I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at University of California Santa Cruz.
I am broadly interested in statistical methods to address scientific questions in demography, epidemiology, and global health. Currently I work on latent variable modeling with high-dimensional data, space-time models, survey sampling, data integration, and weakly supervised learning. My work also often focuses on building workflows and pipelines for complex statistical analysis and data-driven decision-making in real-word settings.
I was previously a postdoctoral researcher working with Forrest Crawford in the Department of Biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, advised by Tyler McCormick.
My research is generously supported by the National Institutes of Health, Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, Vital Strategies, the Hellman Fellows Program, UCOP, and UCSC.
Lab News
- [07/2025] Qianyu Dong successfully passed her PhD candidacy exam! Qianyu will develop Prevalence Mapping and Model Evaluation for Binary and Categorical Outcomes from Household Surveys in her dissertation. Congratulations Qianyu!
- [06/2025] Yu (Zoey) Zhu successfully defended her PhD dissertation on Bayesian Latent Variable Model for Quantification Learning in Mortality Surveillance. Congratulations Dr. Zhu!
- [04/2025] New package led by Yunhan and Qianyu on CRAN: sae4health is a ShinyApp for prevalence mapping using household survey data. Check out the website and the online ShinyApp server for DHS data and the beta-version ShinyApp for MICS data! A working paper summarizes the software is here
- [01/2025] New ShinyApps on California farmworker health are alive on web and mobile! The Apps are developed by Ewan Whittaker-Walker. Check out the website and our amazing team!
- [06/2024] Sho Kawano successfully passed his PhD candidacy exam! Sho will develop dependent shrinkage priors for small area estimation in his dissertation. Congratulations Sho!
- [06/2024] PhD student Yu (Zoey) Zhu awarded JSM travel award from SF chapter of ASA and Sho Kawano awarded the Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship form the Governmental Statistics Section of the ASA. Congratulations Zoey and Sho!
- [4/2024] New package led by Qianyu on CRAN: surveyPrev provides a general framework for small area estimation and prevalence mapping using DHS data. Check out our vignettes on modeling and customization!
- [3/2024] New small area estimation functions in SUMMER are now part of the survey package: vignette in survey and vignette in SUMMER. SUMMER also has an updated website!
- [09/2023] New NIH grant (PI: Jon Wakefield): Bayesian Mortality Estimation from Disparate Data Sources.
- [08/2023] New grant from UC Office of the President on farm worker community health (PI: Matt Sparke).
- [07/2023] Yu (Zoey) Zhu successfully passed her PhD candidacy exam! Zoey will develop Bayesian latent variable models for mortality surveillance in her dissertation. Congratulations Zoey!
- [06/2023] PhD student Yu (Zoey) Zhu and Toshiya Yoshida awarded summer fellowship from the department and Graduate Dean's travel grant from UCSC. Yu (Zoey) Zhu also received travel support to present at WNAR annual meeting. Congratulations Yu and Toshiya!
- [12/2022] PhD student Toshiya Yoshida awarded the 2023 Quad Fellowship. Congratulations Toshiya!
- [09/2022] New NIH grant: Developing an innovative statistical framework to integrate multiple verbal autopsy datasets to estimate cause-specific mortality.
- [08/2022] New grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (PI: Sam Clark) to support the openVA team to create a pathology-informed reference death archive.
- [06/2022] PhD students Yu (Zoey) Zhu and Toshiya Yoshida awarded summer fellowship from the department. Congratulations Zoey and Toshiya!
- [04/2022] New paper out in Global Health Action.
- [03/2022] New grant from the Hellman Fellows program: Towards adaptive verbal autopsy survey design.
- [03/2022] New grant from UCSC Committee on Research: Estimating mortality rates of emerging diseases using verbal autopsies.