Committees
Founders
- Ming-Hui Chen, University of Connecticut
- Ouhong Wang, Angitia Biopharmaceuticals
Organizing Committee
- Jeffrey P. Palmer (Chair), Pfizer (Jeffrey.P.Palmer@pfizer.com)
- Kun Chen, University of Connecticut
- Andy Chi, Takeda
- Ming-Hui Chen, University of Connecticut
- Ran Duan, Angitia Biopharmaceuticals
- Roee Gutman, Brown University
- Jianan Hui (NESS Secretary), Servier
- Yang Song, Vertex
- Sammi Tang, Servier
- Susan Wang, Boehringer Ingelheim
- Richard Zhang, Pfizer
Supporting Team
- Tracy Burke, University of Connecticut
- Simiao Gao (Student volunteer), University of Connecticut
- Min Lin (Student volunteer), University of Connecticut
- Courtney Trzasko, University of Connecticut
- Yelie Yuan (Webmaster), University of Connecticut
Dr. Ming-Hui Chen University of Connecticut
Dr. Ming-Hui Chen is Board
of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of
Statistics at the University of Connecticut (UConn). He was elected to
Fellow of International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2016, Fellow of
the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2007, Fellow of American
Statistical Association in 2005. He also received the University of
Connecticut AAUP Research Excellence Award in 2013, the UConn College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) Excellence in Research Award in the
Physical Sciences Division in 2013, the University of Connecticut Alumni
Association's University Award for Faculty Excellence in Research and
Creativity (Sciences) in 2014, and ICSA Distinguished Achievement Award
in 2020. He has published over 428 statistics and biostatistics
methodological and medical research papers in mainstream statistics,
biostatistics, and medical journals. He has also published five books
including two advanced graduate-level books on Bayesian survival
analysis and Monte Carlo methods in Bayesian computation. He has
supervised or been supervising 37 PhD students. He served as President
of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) in 2013,
Program Chair and Publication Officer of SBSS of the American
Statistical Association (ASA) and the ASA Committee on Nomination for
2016-2017 to nominate candidates for ASA President/Vice President.
Currently, he serves as the 2022 JSM Program Chair, Past President of
the New England Statistical Society (nestat.org), Co Editor-in-Chief of
Statistics and Its Interface, inaugurated Co Editor-in-Chief of New
England Journal of Statistics in Data Science, and an Associate Editor
of JASA, JCGS, and LIDA.
Dr. Ouhong Wang Angitia Biopharmaceuticals
Dr. Ouhong Wang is currently Chief
Development Officer at Angitia Biopharmaceuticals. He took on this
expanded drug developer role in the summer of 2021 after close to 27
years as a pharmaceutical statistician with various companies including
Lilly, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, and most recently as VP, Head of
Biostatistics at Vertex. Ouhong received his PhD in statistics from Iowa
State University.
Dr. Jeff Palmer Pfizer
Jeff Palmer has been a
statistics group head leading early clinical development in rare
diseases at Pfizer for the past 5 years. Prior to Pfizer he had worked
for over ten years with various other pharma and consulting companies
supporting mainly rare diseases, oncology, and neurology. Jeff received
his MS in statistics from the University of Chicago and conducted his
doctoral research in statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Kun Chen University of Connecticut
Dr. Kun Chen is an Associate
Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Connecticut
(UConn), and a Research Fellow at the Center for Population Health,
UConn Health Center. Chen’s research mainly focuses on multivariate
statistical learning, dimension reduction, high-dimensional statistics,
and healthcare analytics with large-scale heterogeneous data. He has
extensive interdisciplinary research experience in a variety of fields
including insurance, ecology, biology, agriculture, medical imaging, and
public health. Chen's research projects have received funding from the
National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Simons Foundation, and the
National Science Foundation (NSF). Recently Chen is funded by NSF for
developing integrative multivariate methods and heterogeneous response
regression, and he is a co-PI in an NIH-funded data-driven suicide
prevention study which leverages integrated big data from disparate
sources scattered in healthcare system. Chen was a Co-Editor of the 2015
ICSA Symposium Proceeding Book, and serves as an Associate Editor of
Sankhya: The Indian Journal of Statistics since 2016. He has received
Recognition for Teaching Excellence at UConn for multiple times.
Chen received his B.Econ. in Finance and Dual B.S. in Computer Science & Technology from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2003, his M.S. in Statistics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2007, and his PhD in Statistics from the University of Iowa in 2011. Before joining UConn, he was on the faculty of Kansas State University from 2011 to 2013.
Dr. Andy Chi Takeda
Andy Chi currently serves as
Executive director of Statistics and Quantitative Sciences (SQS), Data
Sciences Institute (DSI) at Takeda. He is a member of DSI Leadership
team (LT) and SQS management team (MT), supporting development and
commercialization of Takeda Oncology Portfolio. He has 18 years of drug
development experience, and has been strong advocate for innovative
trial design and quantitative decision making using diverse trial types
and data sources in clinical trials, from Academia and RWD/RWE. Andy
received his MS in biometry from University of Texas, Houston, and PhD
in Medical Science from University of South Florida.
Dr. Ran Duan Angitia Biopharmaceuticals
Ran Duan is the Sr. Director,
Global Head of Biometrics at Angitia Biopharmaceuticals. Before joining
Angitia, Ran worked at Alexion, AstraZeneca Rare Disease and Eli Lilly
and Company, where she led multiple ophthalmology and diabetes
pipelines. She is also an active member of the AGA pediatric working
group. Her research interests include the innovative trial design for
pediatric rare disease, RWE generation and digital solutions for health
care. Ran obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of
Missouri-Columbia.
Dr. Jianan Hui Servier
Dr. Jianan Hui is a Sr.
Principal Biostatistician in Global Biostatistics at Servier
Pharmaceuticals. She currently leads the global submission activities in
hematology. Prior to her role at Servier, she was a Senior
Biostatistician at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. She has worked
on various projects in immunology, oncology, cardiovascular and
metabolism. Her research interests includes Bayesian statistics,
adaptive design, statistical go/no-go decision making and statistical
learning. Jianan received her Ph.D. in Applied Statistics at University
of California, Riverside with research focuses in Markov chain Monte
Carlo and spatiotemporal Bayesian Hierarchical modeling. Prior to that,
she received two B.S. degrees in Mathematics from University of Texas at
Arlington and in Information and Computational Science from University
of Science and Technology Beijing.
Dr. Yang Song Vertex
Dr. Yang Song is currently
Senior Director, Biostatistics Therapeutic Area Head for General
Medicines (including gene therapies), Pain and Neurology, at Vertex
Pharmaceuticals Inc., leading his statistical team on multiple rare
disease pipeline development projects. Prior to joining Vertex, he was
with Merck for nearly 10 years, rotated through its PA, Beijing, and NJ
global sites, with increasing responsibilities for global drug
development across multiple therapeutic areas. He also worked with
Johnson & Johnson for oncology drug development early in his career.
His research interests include rare disease clinical trial methodology,
real world evidence, data integration, optimal clinical development
strategy, statistical issues in oncology clinical trials, biomarker
endpoints, and subgroup analyses. He is a member of the ASA
Biopharmaceutical Scientific Working Group on Real World Evidence. Yang
received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin -
Madison.
Dr. Rui (Sammi) Tang Servier
Dr. Rui (Sammi) Tang is a
leading expert of biostatistics/bioinformatics in the
biotech/pharmaceutical industry and she is currently the Head of
Biostatistics, Programming and Medical Writing Department at Servier
Pharmaceuticals US. Prior to join Servier she was the Biostatistics
Therapeutic Area head of Oncology, Transplants, Ophthalmology and
prematurity neonates programs at Shire pharmaceutical. Prior to that she
was at Vertex pharmaceutical leading Oncology and Hematology pipelines.
Before that she also has worked at Amgen for about 8 years, Mayo
clinical biostatistics and Merck shortly. Previously she served as the
biostatistics lead of Companion Diagnostics and the Global Statistics
Lead for multiple oncology clinical programs from early phase to late
phase at Amgen. Sammi has great experience in CDRH, CBER, CDER, health
Canada, EMA and Asian regulatory agencies interactions. Sammi’s research
interests are primarily in the area of adaptive clinical trial design
and biomarker subgroup related statistical issues in precision medicine.
She has authored more than 30 articles in peer-reviewed scientific
journals on methodology, study design, data analysis and reporting and
is a co-inventor of several patents. Besides her daily work, she
actively promotes data science through many of her volunteer activities:
Sammi is co-founder of DahShu which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit
organization, founded to promote research and education in data sciences
with almost 5000 members internationally. She serves in the SCT (Society
of Clinical Trials) scientific program committee and development
committee since 2013 to help organize the annual international
conference. She is leading teams in the DIA (Drug Information
Association) Adaptive design working group of oncology drug development
and small population working group for rare disease statistical
methodology development. She is also an active member in ASA (American
Statistics Association) and ICSA (International Chinese Statistics
Association) to serve the biostatistics and data science professional
community.
Sammi graduated from the University of Michigan Technology University with a PhD in statistics Genetics.
Dr. Susan Wang Boehringer Ingelheim
Dr. Susan Wang is the Global Head
of Biostatistics and Data Sciences in Inflammation at Boehringer
Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. She has many years of experience working on
new drug development and registration as a statistician as well as in
various leadership roles. She is passionate about implementing efficient
statistical methods and statistical modeling in clinical new drug
development, in rare diseases. Susan has a Ph.D. in statistics from
Stony Brook University in New York.
Dr. Richard Zhang Pfizer
Richard Zhang is the Statistics
Group Lead for late phase clinical development in rare diseases at
Pfizer. He has been in the pharmaceutical industry for over twenty years
with exposure to hundreds of clinical trials spanning multiple
therapeutical areas: Neuroscience, Pain, Rheumatology, Endocrine and
IEM. He has extensive knowledge and experience in regulatory
interactions and submissions. His research interests include innovative
trial design, real world evidence, meta-analysis, data mining and
modeling. Richard received his PhD in statistics from the University of
Kentucky.