It All Adds Up: The Transformative Path of A Recent Biostats Grad

Portrait of HSPH student Daniel Schlauch, a mathematician/statistician who earned a living for a few years as a professional poker player. He is pictured next to the statue of Dr. Sidney Farber and "Jimmy", at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Photo by Silvia Mazzocchin

A recent article in the Harvard Gazette describes the lifetime love of numbers that drew recent graduate Daniel Schlauch into biostatistics. With a family penchant for math and a variety of real-world experiences on which he honed his passion, Schlauch moved from mastering online poker, to a position as a software developer helping scientists make sense of their research data, to working with John Quackenbush in the Computational Biology and Functional Genomics Lab at HSPH. The skills he developed in his work there, involving ways to handle the distinction between healthy and diseased states, identifying and correcting subtle biases in data collection, and making it easier to find genetic factors linked to physical traits in large-scale genetic studies, will play an important role in his post-graduation endeavors at Genospace, a Cambridge-based startup using data analytics to lead the fight against cancer.