Biostatistics Seminar Series - Hongzhe Li (Lee), PhD

Title: Bacterial Growth Dynamics, Applied Statistics and Optimal Permutation RecoverAbstract: Public health and biomedicine research are becoming increasingly data intensive.  As health and biomedicine data science has become increasingly prominent, biostatisticians should play a leadership role in harnessing the power of data to promote health, prevent disease and make biomedical discoveries.  In this talk, I use the problem of estimating bacterial growth dynamics from shotgun metagenomics data as an example to emphasize the six pillars of health and biomedicine data science, including data acquisition and domain knowledge, database and programming, applied statistics, theoretical statistics and optimization, dissemination and data privacy.  Statisticians can play important role in each of these six pillars.  I demonstrate that applied statistics and statistical thinking can lead to better algorithms and results in biomedical research.  Similarly, novel statistical theory can provide greater insights into the algorithms and methods.  These six pillars should be integrated into modern public health and biomedical research and education.