We’re continuing to feature our 1st year doctoral students! We hope everyone is able to get to know this talented and diverse new group of students.
Jane Liang
I am from the small, San Francisco Bay Area city of Albany, where I spent my childhood reading voraciously and exploring the secret staircases of the East Bay Hills. I then traveled a vast distance of three miles to earn a bachelor’s degree in statistics from UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate, I wrote an honors thesis titled “Comparing Dependence Measures Using Simulations Studies” with Haiyan Huang and was affably confused by college sports. After graduating, I worked as a programming analysis associate at Kaiser Permanente before moving to Memphis to be a scientific programmer at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Department of Preventive Medicine, Division of Biostatistics. Under the supervision of Śaunak Sen, I worked on matrix linear models for structured high-throughput data and helped maintain the division’s computing cluster. My research interests include statistical genetics, machine learning, and computational problems involving high-dimensional data. In my spare time, I enjoy optimization problems like minimizing time spent on food preparation and maximizing encounters with other people’s pets. I hope that at Harvard Biostatistics, my world will continue to grow bigger.
Yuri Ahuja
I was born and raised in New York City, and graduated from Yale College with a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry before starting my MD/PhD at Harvard Medical School. Since high school, I have had my heart set on pursuing an MD/PhD with the goal of both practicing medicine and pushing its boundaries through research. Originally, I thought I would pursue a PhD in one of the biological sciences; indeed, throughout college I conducted research in molecular biology, pharmacology, and cancer biology. However, after taking several mathematics, computer science, and statistics courses at Yale, I realized that my passion is really for the quantitative sciences. When I arrived at Harvard I switched focus, completing rotations in the Harvard Biomedical Informatics and MIT Computer Science departments. Currently, I am predominantly interested in designing better models to mine electronic medical record data with the goal of enhancing medical decision support, which I believe will revolutionize the concept of personalized medicine in coming years. I am very excited to start in the Biostatistics PhD program this Fall and begin working toward this goal! My main hobby is the violin, which I have played for over 15 years. I have played in numerous orchestra including the New York Youth Symphony and Yale Symphony Orchestras, and hope to join the Longwood Symphony in the Fall!
