ICTS

BERD Staff

Meet the Team

Joni Ricks-Oddie, PhD MPH Director

Joni Ricks-Oddie

Curriculum Vita

Joni Ricks-Oddie, Ph.D (UCLA, 2012) is the Director of the UCI Center for Statistical Consulting. Dr. Ricks-Oddie oversees general operations and strategic planning for the Center and its consulting activities. She facilitates connections between campus researchers in need of consulting services and the Statistics faculty with the expertise to assist them. Dr. Ricks-Oddie’s current affiliations also include the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science where she serves as the Director of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Unit. 

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.