ICTS

BERD Staff

Meet the Team

Hal Stern, PhD Director

Hal Stern

Hal Stern is professor of statistics at UC Irvine.  Stern came to UC Irvine in 2002 as the founding chair of the Department of Statistics and served in that capacity until 2010.  He served as dean of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences from 2010 through 2016.  He previous held faculty appointments at Iowa State University and Harvard University. His statistics research focuses on the development of Bayesian statistical methods and on model assessment techniques. He has authored more than 100 publications and is a co-author of the highly regarded graduate-level statistics text Bayesian Data Analysis. Dr. Stern collaborates regularly with researchers from a range of disciplines.  Current areas of collaboration include biological/health sciences and forensic statistics.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Tuyen Hoang, PhD; Assistant Director

Tuyen Hoang

Curriculum Vita

Dr. Hoang received her PhD degree in Biostatistics at UCLA. After graduation, she joined the Veterans Healthcare system in Los Angeles where she collaborated with medical directors, clinicians, and leading experts in implementation science to develop and deliver innovative care programs in infectious diseases, mental health, and homelessness. Combining her expertise in biostatistics and computer science, she designed clinical informatics tools to extract qualitative, quantitative, and text data from electronic medical records that are useful for clinical operation, patient management, and quality improvement. For research studies, she collaborates with investigators on study design, facilitates data collection, performs statistical analysis, and contributes to research publications. She is experienced in integrating clinical, social, and economical aspects into study design while maintaining a high-level of statistical rigor.

 

Yanjun "Alice" Chen, MS; Principal Statistician

Alice Chen

Curriculaum Vita

Alice received her master's degree in statistics from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2012. 

During her graduate studies, she worked as a research assistant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She conducted data analysis in collaborative research with biomedical researchers, as well as contributing to statistical methodology research. After graduate studies, she joined the City of Hope Beckman Research Institute as a biostatistician in 2012, where she worked with medical researchers with clinical data maintenance and management, study design, statistical analysis, and manuscript preparation. Her works at the City of Hope focused on relapse and treatment adherence in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She has developed expertise in multivariate modeling, propensity score, and development and validation of clinical prognostic (prediction) models. She has also worked extensively with patient hospitalization data, particularly with the United States Renal Data System, a national database which captures data on nearly all patients on dialysis in the US. Alice joined ICTS in March of 2015.

Lishi Zhang, MS; Senior Biostatistician

Lishi Zhang
Lishi received her master's degree in statistics at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey in December of 2013. During the summer of 2013, she worked as a research intern in the Medicare star rating group at Cambia Health Solutions (Portland, OR). She was responsible for organizing and managing Medicare data. She applied statistical modeling and data visualization techniques to contribute to strategies for improving the star rating of their Medicare plans. After graduation, Lishi worked as a biostatistician at Clinical and Translational Research Institute, UC San Diego (March 2014 - Nov 2015). She was involved in a variety of observational studies and clinical trial projects. She has extensive experience in conducting statistical analysis and collaborating on reseach proposal with clinical investigators. She has gained expertise in variety of statistical methods, including mixed model, meta-analysis, general estimation equations, survival analysis, regression, and clustering methods. Lishi joined the ICTS BERD unit in November of 2015.