Qian Du

A curious scientist with a prior knowledge in Precision Medicine.

I am currently a senior research scientist of precision medicine at GNS Healthcare. In my role, I apply statistical methods and build computation tools to analyze genetics data and identify novel therapeutic targets. I also serve as one of the organizers of the Bay Area Biotech-Pharma Statistics (BBSW) Meetups.

I obtained my Master degree in Statistics in 2016 and my PhD degree in Bioinformatics in 2019, both from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I worked with Dr. Michael Love and Dr. Joseph Ibrahim to develop statistical methods for sequence count data and integrative functional genomics. During my PhD I worked at the Biostatistics Core of Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center collaborating with oncologists on multiple clinical and genomics studies. I also worked with Dr. Donglin Zeng on estimating and testing causal effects of drug/drug-drug interactions with electronic medical records (EMR).

My favorite statistics quote is “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” by statistician George Box.

Research Interests

• Statistical methods of genomics data
• RNA-seq and scRNA-seq data
• Statistical genetics
• Empirical Bayes methods
• Causal inference methods

Skills

• R - package development, data analaysis and visualization, RStudio
• SAS - data management and statistical procedures, certified SAS programmer
• SQL - MySQL, PostgreSQL
• High Performance Computing - SGE, slurm, LSF
• UNIX commands and bash script writing
• Git

Personal News

• September 2019 - Invited talk for the 2021 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, session title Recent advances in statistical methods for large-scale omics data.