Bio

Dr. Naim Rashid is an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and has a joint appointment at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC). His methodological work spans several areas in genomics and statistics, addressing problems facing basic science, translational, and clinical researchers in cancer.

Previously, Dr. Rashid was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, under Giovanni Parmigiani and Nikhil Munshi.

Research

Dr. Rashid’s publications have had wide impact, appearing in journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, PNAS, JCO, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Biometrics. Many of his statistical methods have been implemented as open-source software packages for the public to use.

Recent areas of research include precision medicine, multi-study replicability, clinical trials, cancer subtyping, and missing data problems in deep learning. He applies this expertise in his role as an Associate Editor for the Annals of Applied Statistics and a member of the Nature Medicine Statistical Advisory Panel.

He also engages in collaborative studies at Lineberger, working with physicians and researchers on problems relating to genomics and clinical studies. As the Associate Director of the LCCC Biostatistics Shared Resource, he aids in the design of cancer clinical trials at UNC and elsewhere, serving as trial statistician on a number of active protocols.

As a member of the Translational Breast Cancer Research Consortium Statistical Working Group, he develops and reviews novel clinical trials in breast cancer with oncologists nationwide. He also serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for The V Foundation for Cancer Research.

Funding

Dr. Rashid is currently co-PI of U01 CA274298 “Integrating tumor and stroma to understand and predict treatment response,” which proposes machine learning tools to subtype patient stroma in pancreatic cancer and examine its interaction with tumor subtypes on patient outcomes.

He is also co-leader of the UNC SPORE in Pancreatic Cancer’s Integrated Quantitative Sciences Core, where he coordinates the design and analysis of SPORE project data and develop new statistical tools in support of SPORE aims. He similarly co-leads the UNC SPORE in Breast cancer’s Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core.

Dr. Rashid is PI of a Department of Defense Grant to build an Large Language Model-based AI tool that generates personalized clinical trial recommendations for patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma to help with self-advocacy and increase awareness of eligible trials.

In his time at UNC, Dr. Rashid has helped bring in over 30 grants as either PI, co-PI, Co-I, or biostatistician, many of which are funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Teaching

Each spring, Dr. Rashid also teaches BIOS 735, a doctoral-level course in the Department of Biostatistics covering topics such as writing efficient and reproducible code, implementing various optimization and numerical integration algorithms, and applying multiple machine learning methods. He also chairs the department’s doctoral applied exam committee, and serves on the UNC Gillings Research Council.