Nicole C. Close is trained in Epidemiology/Biostatistics with 20 years of professional experience in designing and implementing clinical trials. Her passion for her field is expressed in the diligence and insightfulness she brings to each project, device and therapeutic area. After years in the industry, she founded her own company, EmpiriStat, in 2008 specializing in Biostatistics and trial design for regulatory submissions in the US, Europe and Asia. Dr. Close has served at and on DSMBs, as a panel review member for grants, and Board member for several clinical trial and statistical professional organizations. She is an avid lecturer at colleges and professional meetings, serves as a mentor for Entrepreneurs and undergraduates pursuing interests in the biology and mathematics area. Dr. Close was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year for Women in Technology in Washington, DC, and EmpiriStat has won several awards as Best Place to work and Best Small Business with the Chamber of Commerce. Dr. Close also enjoys scuba, international travel, and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

large-scale, multi-site data collection and statistical analysis activities

Dr. Zhang is currently Chair of the Department of Statistics. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Alberta in 1997. His research interests cover a wide range of topics which include general statistical methodology, empirical Bayes data analysis, bioinformatics, large scale multiple hypothesis testing and its application to genomics, statistical methods related to influenza virus genotyping and developing computationally intensive algorithms for analyzing biological and health survey data. He has also worked in big data analytics.

general statistical methodology, empirical Bayes data analysis, bioinformatics, large scale multiple hypothesis testing and its application to genomics, statistical methods related to influenza virus genotyping

Award winning Key Note Speaker at International Level, Professor Ajit Kumar Roy is an acclaimed researcher and consultant. Prof. Roy obtained his M.Sc. degree in Statistics and joined Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) as a Scientist (Statistics) in 1976. In recent past was engaged as National Consultant (Impact Assessment), for East & North Eastern States of India at National Agricultural Innovation Project (World Bank funded) of ICAR. Prior to that he had served as a Consultant (Statistics) at Central Agricultural University, Agartala. Earlier had served at CIFA, ICAR, as Principal Scientist and was involved in applied research in the areas of ICT, Statistics, Bioinformatics Analytics, and Economics. At International level he served as a Computer Specialist at SAARC Agricultural Information Centre (SAIC), Dhaka, Bangladesh for over 3 years. He has successfully organized many workshops on application of ICT in fisheries/agriculture research at National and International level. Prof. Roy is having over 45 years of research and teaching experience. His recent best-sellers are 'Applied Big Data Analytics'; 'Impact of Big Data Analytics on Business, Economy, Health Care and Society'; ‘Web Resources for Bioinformatics, Biotechnology and Life Sciences Research: Bioinformatics Skill Development’; 'Applied Bioinformatics, Statistics and Economics in Fisheries Research'; 'Applied Computational Biology & Statistics in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics' and Data Science –A Career Option for 21st Century. He is widely recognized as an expert research scientist, teacher, author, hands-on leader in advanced analytics. Presently visiting professor of four Indian universities.

Statistics, Bioinformatics Analytics, and Economic

Abbas F Jawad has earned his MSc (1986) and PhD (1993) from the Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, USA. He is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics in Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, and Department of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He has published more than 100 papers in reputed journals and has been providing biostatistical support for medical pediatric research for more than 20 years.

Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, clinical trials

Joel E Michalek completed his PhD from Wayne State University. He has a broad background in biostatistics pertaining to theory and methods, preclinical and clinical trials, and epidemiology. He has written protocols and grants, analyzed data, and co-authored manuscripts arising from clinical studies in surgery, emergency medicine, cancer, and pediatrics and was formerly Principal Investigator of the Air Force Health Study, a 20-year prospective epidemiological study of veterans who sprayed Agent Orange and other herbicides in Vietnam. He has authored 180 journal articles and two book chapters.

biostatistics, preclinical and clinical trials, and epidemiology

Dr. Bin Li leads a computational biology team at translational medicine department, Takeda Pharmaceuticals International Co. His team provides computational supports on translational medicine research for various Takeda compounds. They develop computational methods for clinical biomarker research, build predictive models for biomarker and patient stratification, and design/implement translational data repositories. His team is also responsible for method evaluation and pipeline building for various NGS platforms, including WES, RNA-seq, and targeted NGS panels.

Computational biology, predictive modeling, biomarker, network analysis, precision medicine

Jacinthe Jacqueline Meulman is a Dutch psychologist and Professor of Applied Data theory at the Leiden University. Meulman's research interest are in the field of data applied theory, and work includes the development of new statistical methods with applications in behavioral science and medicine . Since the 1990s, she manages the SPSS research, focusing on the development of software for nonlinear multivariate analysis. In Leiden, she is involved in the design of the first Master of Applied Statistics.

Analysis of high-dimensional data, such as gene-disease association in genomics, and the prediction of groups on the basis of NMR and mass spectrometry data in proteomics and metabolomics

Ram Shanmugam is the Editor-in-Chief for the journals: Epidemiology & Community Medicine, Advances in Life Sciences and Health, and Global Journal of Research and Review. He is the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Research in Medical Sciences. He is the Book-Review Editor of the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. He directed Statistics Consulting Center in the Mississippi State University. In 2015, he has published a textbook with the title “Statistics for Engineers and Scientists”. He served the Argonne National Lab., University of Colorado, University of South Alabama and the Indian Statistical Institute. He has published 125 research articles and is a Fellow of the International Statistical Institute. Currently, he is a Professor in the School of Health Administration, Texas State University. He is a recipient of several research awards from the Texas State University.

Operational research in health administration, clinical trails, informatics, six-sigma methodologies, environmental models, financial forecasts, and multivariate data collection, analysis & interpretation

Xing Li has completed his PhD in Bioinformatics from The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is an Assistant Professor in Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Department of Health Science Research at Mayo Clinic which has been recognized as the best hospital for 2014-2015 by US News & World Report. He has published more than 18 papers in reputed journals and has been serving as Peer Reviewers of over a dozen of journals, such as Genomics, BMC Bioinformatics, Stem Cell Research, PLOS ONE, Physiological Genomics, etc.

Bioinformatics

Vladimir Anisimov has experience in pharmaceutical industry since 2002 when he joined the Research Statistics Unit, GlaxoSmithKline. He led the development and implementation of the innovative analytic statistical methodologies and predictive patient recruitment and drug supply modelling tools in GSK trials. In 2012 he joined the Advanced Analytics Group, Innovation, Quintiles. Prior to GSK he had worked as university professor and established the Applied Statistics Department at Kiev University, Ukraine and served for more than 20 years as Professor & Head and also as Supervisor of Probabilistic-Statistical Laboratory at the same Department. HE has published about 200 papers and several books in stochastic models, applied probability and statistics, supervised 24 Ph.D. theses, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine. He has Supervised numerous number of different industrial projects and some EU projects (Tempus, Intas).

Biostatistics, Clinical Trials, Statistics, Clinical Study Design, CRO, SAS, Clinical Research

Jake Oliver is a part of the Biostatistics and Ecology research group in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. His research interests are focused on statistical methods applied to epidemiological, psychological and population health data. His main application area is in road safety and injury research, although he routinely collaborate with cancer, psychological and cardiovascular researchers.

Biostatistics, Applied Statistics, Epidemiology

WenJun Zhang is a professor at the Sun Yat-sen University, China and International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Hong Kong. He has Master degree in Insect Ecology and Modeling and PhD in Plant Epidemiology and Modeling from Northwestern Agricultural University. He had worked as Senior research scientist working on simulation model of insect-NPV-crop system in Wageningen University, The Netherlands and was Visiting scientist, working on modeling of metabolic regulation network, Japan.He is the Editor-in-Chief for many international journals (Proceedings of the International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Computational Ecology and Software , Network Biology, Selforganizology, Arthropods and Environmental Skeptics and Critics).

Network Biology, Biomathematics, Computational Science, Modelling, Ecology, Environmental Sciences.

Rama Shanker has completed his Bachelor, Master and Doctorate degrees in Statistics from Department of Statistics, Patna University, Patna, India. He was awarded gold medal for securing first position at Master examination in Patna University in 1996. After completing his Ph.D in 2003, he worked in different colleges/ Institutes in India till March 2006. From April, 2006 to April, 2012, he worked as Assistant Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at the College of Business and Economics, Halhale, Eritrea. He worked as Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics, Eritrea Institute of Technology, Asmara, Eritrea from October, 2012 to July, 2014. Due to his active participation in teaching and outstanding research in the institute, he was promoted to Professor of Statistics and Head, Department of Statistics, Eritrea Institute of Technology, Asmara, Eritrea from August, 2014. Prof. Shanker research interest areas are Distribution Theory, Biostatistics/Medical Statistics, modeling of Lifetime Data, Statistical Inference, Mathematical Demography, Transportation and Assignment Problems. He has more than 30 research papers published in national and international journals of Statistics, Mathematics and Operations research. Recently he has introduced eight new one parameter lifetime distributions namely Shanker, Akash, Aradhana, Sujatha, Garima, Amarendra, Devya, and Shambhu distributions for modeling lifetime data from Biological Sciences/Medical Sciences and Engineering. Further, he has obtained their Poisson mixtures and discussed their size-biasing and zero-truncation and their applications in different fields. He has communicated more than 30 research papers related to these distributions for publications in reputed journals of Statistics and it is expected that these distributions will create landmarks in the fields of distribution theory and Biostatistics/Medical Statistics. Prof. Shanker is the founding Editor-In-Chief of “Eritrean Journal of Science and Engineering (EJSE)”, a biannual Science and Engineering journal, published from Eritrea Institute of Technology, Eritrea. He is the International advisory board members of some research journals published from India and USA and reviewers of research papers in his areas of interests of different journals of Statistics. He has been working as the International advisory committee members of conferences/seminars in Statistics and delivered invited /plenary talks in international/national conferences / seminars in Statistics and related disciplines. He is the examiner of Ph.D thesis of different universities/Institutions in Statistics.

Biostatistics