Biostatistics team and collaborators

Doctoral Student
Department of Biostatistics
Gillings School of Global Public Health

Amber Young is a Gillings PhD candidate co-advised by Drs. Naim Rashid and Didong Li. A former NCI Cancer Genomics Training Grant scholar, she develops semi-supervised matrix factorization approaches for pancreatic cancer subtyping and leads collaborations with UNC surgical oncology cohorts.

Doctoral Student
Department of Biostatistics
Gillings School of Global Public Health

Tyler Humpherys is a Biostatistics PhD student co-advised by Drs. Naim Rashid, Didong Li, and Michael Kosorok. His dissertation spans offline reinforcement learning and large language models for precision health and pancreatic cancer trial navigation.

Doctoral Student
Department of Biostatistics
Gillings School of Global Public Health

Dinelka Nanayakkara is a Gillings PhD student in Biostatistics advised by Dr. Naim Rashid. He creates transfer learning frameworks that bolster pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma subtype classification from liquid biopsy data, accelerating precision oncology efforts across UNC Lineberger studies.

Doctoral Student
Department of Biostatistics
Gillings School of Global Public Health

Jialiu Xie is a UNC Biostatistics PhD student co-supervised by Drs. Naim Rashid and Di Wu. He designs multi-omic statistical methods for microbiome data, enabling integrated tumor–microbiota analyses that drive new precision medicine targets across Lineberger studies.

Doctoral Student
Department of Biostatistics
Gillings School of Global Public Health

Andrew Walther is a Biostatistics PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill with expertise in machine learning, spatial statistics, and precision medicine. His research focuses on efficient estimation of interventions for spatial cluster randomized trials with spatial dependence and spillover effects, combining methodological innovation with applications in colorectal cancer therapeutics and pharmaceutical marketing analytics.

Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health

Pedro is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and a Lineberger/UNC Biostatistics alumnus. His lab develops precision oncology methods inspired by his doctoral work with Drs. Naim Rashid and Joseph Ibrahim, and he continues to co-author adaptive trial designs with the UNC translational breast and pancreatic cancer teams.

Biostatistician
Precision Genomics Programs

Euphy Wu earned her PhD in Biostatistics as a Gillings doctoral trainee co-mentored by Drs. Naim Rashid and Mike Love. She led the lab’s allele-specific expression and topic-modeling pipelines for multi-omic biomarker discovery, earning best-poster honors at JSM 2024 and catalyzing UNC Lineberger precision oncology collaborations. She holds a BS in Mathematics and Integrative Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Scientist II
Department of Data Science
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Hillary Heiling is a Scientist II (Collaborative Biostatistician) in the Department of Data Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. A Rashid Lab alumna, she co-led high-dimensional mixed model development for cancer subtype prediction and released the `glmmPen` R package while supporting Lineberger clinical collaborators across breast and thoracic oncology.

Principal Statistician
Statistical Methods & AI/ML
GSK

David Lim is a principal statistician at GSK specializing in statistical machine learning for high-dimensional biomedical data. As a Rashid Lab alumnus, he pioneered deep-learning frameworks for non-ignorable missingness in electronic health records and co-developed generalized linear models with missing data now informing ARPA-H ADAPT analytics.

Scientific Investigator
Computational Biology, Clinical Biomarker Analytics
GSK

Scott Van Buren is a Scientific Investigator in Clinical Biomarker Analytics at GSK. During his PhD training with Dr. Naim Rashid, he advanced semi-supervised optimization tools for rare cell detection and collaborated with Lineberger oncologists on precision medicine trials.