Boshao Zhang, Ph.D.
 | Department of Biostatistics Ryals Public Health Bldg 443 Cubicle A University of Alabama at Birmingham Birmingham, AL 35294 Phone: (205) 975-9217 Fax: (205) 975-2540 E-mail: BoZhang@ms.soph.uab.edu Full CV |
Boshao Zhang, from China, finished his PhD degree in Epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina, 2009. His dissertation was on The Two Stage Clonal Expansion Models of Carcinogenesis for Acute, Continuous, and Multiple Exposures with Applications to Radiation. He derived the analytic hazard function and survival function for the model first proposed by Moolgavkar et al (1990), and extended the model to acute, continuous and multiple exposures with applications in radiation. His work facilitated the estimation of the parameters of the model without the need of numeric integration and derivative computation in the Maximum Likelihood Estimation. The applications involve the risk predication of cancer in a time-dependent functional form. During his doctoral study, he also took courses related to clinical trials and mathematical modeling in biology and medicine. During this period, he started to form his own research. He is interested in fundamental statistical problems in addition to the research projects related to his dissertation. One example is proposing a new statistical test to deal with shortcomings of the original t test with three hypotheses, allowing more flexible decision making. In 2009, he started his post-doctorial training in statistical genetics in the Department of Biostatistics, University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research has been focused on genotype imputation. He investigated the factors affecting the quality of genotype imputation through large scale simulations. Furthermore, he studied the pattern of differential dropout in the imputed data, and the effect of the differential dropout on genetic association studies. These works may be helpful and provide guidelines to researchers in the field of genetic studies. He will work as a postdoctorial fellow in Pharmaco-epidemiology and comparative effectiveness research at Regenstrief Institute. Specifically he will participate in the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Study (OMOP) and other projects.
His research interests include statistical issues in biomedical research, clinical trials, statistical issues related to genetics. His main computing expertise includes implementing tasks using R/Splus, SAS, and Matlab both at desktop and Linux/Unix cluster supercomputer system.
He is open minded in discussion with people from other fields. One of the questions he may ask you if you are a biologist is how to build a cell with all the components and the possible issues we may encounter as we try to build a car with all the parts available. Another challenge he is interested in is to build a model car with food and eat it after the competition. As a pastime, he loves hiking, swimming, tennis, etc.
Publications
Acknowledgement and Disclaimer
The trainee's projects are supported by Grant Number R01GM081488 from the Genome Wide Haplotype Association Analysis. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Genome Wide Haplotype Association Analysis or the National Institutes of Health.
Years: 2009 - 2011
Mentor(s): Nianjun Liu, PhD
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Regenstrief Institute affiliated with the School of Medicine, Indiana University.
