Xihong Lin
Primary Faculty

Xihong Lin

Professor of Biostatistics

Biostatistics

xlin@hsph.harvard.edu

Other Positions

Coordinating Director, Program in Quantitative Genomics

Biostatistics

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Professor of Statistics

Statistics -Sr. Faculty

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics

Statistics -Sr. Faculty

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences


Overview

Xihong Lin is Professor and Former Chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Coordinating Director of the Program in Quantitative Genomics at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and Professor of the Department of Statistics at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

Dr. Lin's research interests lie in the development and application of scalable statistical and machine learning methods for the analysis of massive data from the genome, exposome and phenome, including big and complex genetic and genomic, epidemiological and health data. Some examples of her current research include analytic methods and applications for large scale Whole Genome Sequencing studies, biobanks and Electronic Health Records, techniques and tools for whole genome variant functional annotations, analysis of the interplay of genes and environment, multiple phenotype analysis, polygenic risk prediction and heritability estimation. Additional examples include integrative analysis of different types of data, Mendelian Randomization, causal mediation analysis and causal inference, federated and transferred learning, single cell genomics, analysis of epidemiological and complex observational studies, and analysis of COVID-19 epidemic data. Dr. Lin's theoretical and computational statistical research includes statistical methods for testing a large number of complex hypotheses, causal inference, statistical and ML methods for large matrices, prediction models using high-dimensional data, federated and transferred learning, cloud-based statistical computing, and mixed models, nonparametric and semiparametric regression, and statistical methods for epidemiological studies.

Dr. Lin's statistical methodological research has been supported by the MERIT Award (R37) (2007-2015), the Outstanding Investigator Award (OIA) (R35) (2015-2029) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the R01 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. She is the multiple PI of a Predictive Modeling Center of the Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF) Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), and the multiple PI of the U19 grant on Integrative Analysis of Lung Cancer Etiology and Risk from NCI. She is also the contact PI of the T32 training grant on interdisciplinary training in statistical genetics and computational biology. She is the former contact PI of the Program Project (P01) on Statistical Informatics in Cancer Research from NCI, and the former contact PI of the Harvard Analysis Center (U19) of the Genome Sequencing Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Dr. Lin was active in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a corresponding author of the JAMA and Nature papers on the analysis of the Wuhan COVID-19 data on transmission, public health intervention and epidemiological characteristics. She is the senior author of the 2021 Journal of the American Statistical Association Discussion paper on modeling COVID transmission dynamics in US. In Spring 2020, Dr. Lin served on the State of Massachusetts COVID-19 Task Force, and testified in the UK Parliament's Committee of Science and Technology on COVID Responses.

Dr. Lin is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. She received the 2002 Mortimer Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association, the 2006 Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Presidents' Award, the 2017 COPSS FN David Award, the 2008 Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement of a Woman in Statistics, the 2022 National Institute of Statistical Sciences Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research, and the 2022 Marvin Zelen Leadership Award. She is an elected fellow of American Statistical Association (ASA), Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and International Statistical Institute.

Dr. Lin is the former Chair of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) (2010-2012) and a former member of the Committee of Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) of the National Academy of Science. She is the founding chair of the US Biostatistics Department Chair Group, and the founding co-chair of the Young Researcher Workshop of East-North American Region (ENAR) of International Biometric Society. She co-launched the Section of Statistical Genetics and Genomics of the American Statistical Association and served as a former section chair. She is the former Coordinating Editor of Biometrics and the founding co-editor of Statistics in Biosciences. She has served on a large number of committees of many statistical societies, and numerous NIH and NSF review panels.


Bibliography

Lung cancer risk discrimination of prediagnostic proteomics measurements compared with existing prediction tools.

Feng X, Wu WY, Onwuka JU, Haider Z, Alcala K, Smith-Byrne K, Zahed H, Guida F, Wang R, Bassett JK, Stevens V, Wang Y, Weinstein S, Freedman ND, Chen C, Tinker L, Nøst TH, Koh WP, Muller D, Colorado-Yohar SM, Tumino R, Hung RJ, Amos CI, Lin X, Zhang X, Arslan AA, Sánchez MJ, Sørgjerd EP, Severi G, Hveem K, Brennan P, Langhammer A, Milne RL, Yuan JM, Melin B, Johansson M, Robbins HA, Johansson M.

J Natl Cancer Inst. 2023 Sep 07. 115(9):1050-1059. PMID: 37260165

Rare variants in long non-coding RNAs are associated with blood lipid levels in the TOPMed Whole Genome Sequencing Study.

Wang Y, Selvaraj MS, Li X, Li Z, Holdcraft JA, Arnett DK, Bis JC, Blangero J, Boerwinkle E, Bowden DW, Cade BE, Carlson JC, Carson AP, Chen YI, Curran JE, de Vries PS, Dutcher SK, Ellinor PT, Floyd JS, Fornage M, Freedman BI, Gabriel S, Germer S, Gibbs RA, Guo X, He J, Heard-Costa N, Hildalgo B, Hou L, Irvin MR, Joehanes R, Kaplan RC, Kardia SL, Kelly TN, Kim R, Kooperberg C, Kral BG, Levy D, Li C, Liu C, Lloyd-Jone D, Loos RJ, Mahaney MC, Martin LW, Mathias RA, Minster RL, Mitchell BD, Montasser ME, Morrison AC, Murabito JM, Naseri T, O'Connell JR, Palmer ND, Preuss MH, Psaty BM, Raffield LM, Rao DC, Redline S, Reiner AP, Rich SS, Ruepena MS, Sheu WH, Smith JA, Smith A, Tiwari HK, Tsai MY, Viaud-Martinez KA, Wang Z, Yanek LR, Zhao W, Rotter JI, Lin X, Natarajan P, Peloso GM.

medRxiv. 2023 Jun 29. PMID: 37425772

Impact of Aneuploidy and Chromosome 9p Loss on Tumor Immune Microenvironment and Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Efficacy in NSCLC.

Alessi JV, Wang X, Elkrief A, Ricciuti B, Li YY, Gupta H, Spurr LF, Rizvi H, Luo J, Pecci F, Lamberti G, Recondo G, Venkatraman D, Di Federico A, Gandhi MM, Vaz VR, Nishino M, Sholl LM, Cherniack AD, Ladanyi M, Price A, Richards AL, Donoghue M, Lindsay J, Sharma B, Turner MM, Pfaff KL, Felt KD, Rodig SJ, Lin X, Meyerson ML, Johnson BE, Christiani DC, Schoenfeld AJ, Awad MM.

J Thorac Oncol. 2023 May 27. PMID: 37247843

Powerful, scalable and resource-efficient meta-analysis of rare variant associations in large whole genome sequencing studies.

Li X, Quick C, Zhou H, Gaynor SM, Liu Y, Chen H, Selvaraj MS, Sun R, Dey R, Arnett DK, Bielak LF, Bis JC, Blangero J, Boerwinkle E, Bowden DW, Brody JA, Cade BE, Correa A, Cupples LA, Curran JE, de Vries PS, Duggirala R, Freedman BI, Göring HHH, Guo X, Haessler J, Kalyani RR, Kooperberg C, Kral BG, Lange LA, Manichaikul A, Martin LW, McGarvey ST, Mitchell BD, Montasser ME, Morrison AC, Naseri T, O'Connell JR, Palmer ND, Peyser PA, Psaty BM, Raffield LM, Redline S, Reiner AP, Reupena MS, Rice KM, Rich SS, Sitlani CM, Smith JA, Taylor KD, Vasan RS, Willer CJ, Wilson JG, Yanek LR, Zhao W, Rotter JI, Natarajan P, Peloso GM, Li Z, Lin X.

Nat Genet. 2023 01. 55(1):154-164. PMID: 36564505

Targeted Genome Sequencing Identifies Multiple Rare Variants in Caveolin-1 Associated with Obstructive Sleep Apnea.

Liang J, Wang H, Cade BE, Kurniansyah N, He KY, Lee J, Sands SA, A Brody J, Chen H, Gottlieb DJ, Evans DS, Guo X, Gharib SA, Hale L, Hillman DR, Lutsey PL, Mukherjee S, Ochs-Balcom HM, Palmer LJ, Purcell S, Saxena R, Patel SR, Stone KL, Tranah GJ, Boerwinkle E, Lin X, Liu Y, Psaty BM, Vasan RS, Manichaikul A, Rich SS, Rotter JI, Sofer T, Redline S, Zhu X.

Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2022 11 15. 206(10):1271-1280. PMID: 35822943

A framework for detecting noncoding rare-variant associations of large-scale whole-genome sequencing studies.

Li Z, Li X, Zhou H, Gaynor SM, Selvaraj MS, Arapoglou T, Quick C, Liu Y, Chen H, Sun R, Dey R, Arnett DK, Auer PL, Bielak LF, Bis JC, Blackwell TW, Blangero J, Boerwinkle E, Bowden DW, Brody JA, Cade BE, Conomos MP, Correa A, Cupples LA, Curran JE, de Vries PS, Duggirala R, Franceschini N, Freedman BI, Göring HHH, Guo X, Kalyani RR, Kooperberg C, Kral BG, Lange LA, Lin BM, Manichaikul A, Manning AK, Martin LW, Mathias RA, Meigs JB, Mitchell BD, Montasser ME, Morrison AC, Naseri T, O'Connell JR, Palmer ND, Peyser PA, Psaty BM, Raffield LM, Redline S, Reiner AP, Reupena MS, Rice KM, Rich SS, Smith JA, Taylor KD, Taub MA, Vasan RS, Weeks DE, Wilson JG, Yanek LR, Zhao W, Rotter JI, Willer CJ, Natarajan P, Peloso GM, Lin X.

Nat Methods. 2022 12. 19(12):1599-1611. PMID: 36303018


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