Research Group

We have three core areas of research currently being actively worked on by people both inside and outside of the Statistics Department. Under each area of research is a description of the type of projects including a list of collaborators, current students and former students all working within these areas of research with Dr. Kimmel.

• Bo Peng
  bpeng@mdanderson.org
  Collaborator, Former student
  Interests: My research focuses on the evolution of complex human diseases and its applications in genetic epidemiology. I have developed methods and programs to simulate the evolution of complex human diseases with applications in the characterization of allele frequencies of disease susceptibility loci (common disease – common variant hypothesis), and in the mapping of complex diseases influenced by multiple interacting genetic and environmental factors. Using lung cancer as a model disease, I am working on the simulation of large datasets with realistic population and individual properties. These datasets will be used to compare and develop statistical methods in the detection and localization of susceptibility loci of diseases that are strongly influenced by environmental factors.
  MDAnderson Faculty Page
  SimuPOP
  
  
• Xiaowei Wu
  xwwu@rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests: Evolutionary and Population Genetics/Bioinformatics/Bayesian Methods and MCMC
  
  
• Dajiang Liu
  dajiang.liu@gmail.com
  Current Student
  Interests: I am working on mapping complex diseases due to rare variants using next generation sequencing data. More specifically, I worked in the following two fields: 1) I developed methods of detecting associations for complex traits in the presence of gene interactions and 2) I am working on efficient studies for mapping rare quantitative loci.
  
  
• Stephanie Hicks
  sch1@rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  
• Daniel Covarrubias
  dcovarru@stat.rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  
• Biao Li
  lb4@rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  
• Matthias Mathaes
  matze@rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  

• Li Deng
  DengL@neco.edu
  Former Student
  Interests: Currently my primary research area is collaborative research in vision science. Specifically, to identify risk factors for myopia (nearsightness) and study the mechanism of myopia using population data and retina image data applying classical statistical methods or data mining techniques. For statistical methodology, I am working on developing the estimates for sensitivity and specificity in the presence of verification bias when the sample size is small. Other interests include correlated binary data and statistical genetics.
  
  
• Deborah Goldwasser
  dlg2004@stat.rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  
• Millennia Foy
  mfoy@rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  

• Pawel Paszek
  paszek@liv.ac.uk
  Former Student
  Interests: Pawel has background in control theory, probability and stochastic processes. He received a MS in 2001 for analysis of non-linear control systems from the Silesian Technical University, Gliwice, Poland. In 2006 He received a PhD in statistics from Rice University, Houston, Texas. The main focus of his work has been modeling stochasticity in gene expression with particular focus on the mathematical modeling of stochastic gene regulation in the NF-KB pathway. He has recently moved to Liverpool in order to work with the dynamic imaging data being generated in the Centre for Cell Imaging. He is currently working on the stochastic regulation of inflammatory processes.
  Centre for Cell Imaging
  
  
  
• Roberto Bertolusso
  Roberto.Bertolusso@rice.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  
• Elizabeth Jones
  edjones@bcm.edu
  Current Student
  Interests:
  
  

• Sharon Plon
  splon@bcm.edu
  Collaborator
  Interests:
  
  
• Olga Gorlova
  oygorlov@mdanderson.org
  Collaborator
  Interests: