People
Wei Xu
Title: Clinician Scientist
Dr. Wei Xu is a Clinician Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. He is also an Associate Professor of Biostatistics at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. He leads the Biostatistics Department at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Dr. Xu’s research interests focus on cancer big data, statistical methodology, clinical trial design and analysis, statistical genetics, bioinformatics, predictive model construction, and personalized medicine development. As Principal-Investigator or Co-PI, he has been awarded more than 30 grants on cancer clinical and translational research studies. So far, he has published over 340 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals on statistics, bioinformatics, medical science, and human genetics. His H-index is 59 with more than 17,000 citations. Dr. Xu is also the co-Director of the COMBIEL training program at Ontario Cancer Institute.
PubMed:
Lisa Wang
Title: Principal biostatistician
Lisa Wang is a Principal Biostatistician at Princess Margaret Cancer Center and an Assistant Professor of Dalla Lana School of Public Health at University of Toronto. She is also a member of Ontario Cancer Research Ethics Board. She graduated from The University of Western Ontario in 2003 and joined Princes Margaret Cancer Center in 2004. Mrs. Lisa Wang has been the sole Biostatistician for the Princess Margaret Hospital Consortium (PMHC) over the last 11 years which has led over 100 early phase academic trials in Canada. Many of these studies also incorporate novel endpoints/designs, assessment and validation of novel therapeutic strategies for cancer including molecular targeted therapies. She was the Chair of Data Safety Monitor Board (DSMB) of PMHC from 2007-2016 and the member of Princess Margaret Cancer Center DSMB from 2007-2013. Her primary research interests are early phase clinical trial design, time to event analysis, longitudinal and missing data analysis. She is the first and co-author of more than 100 publications in both major statistical and medical research book chapter and journals.
PubMed:
Shiyi Chen
Shiyi has research background in bone marrow transplant (BMT), pediatric diseases as well as HIV related outcomes. Shiyi is well versed in various statistical techniques and is experienced in analyzing cancer survival, treatment efficacy and disease prevention. She is also passionate about using data to tell meaningful stories and drive insights.
PubMed:
Title: Senior biostatistician
Jain Rahi
Title: Post Doctoral Fellow
Rahi is a postdoctoral fellow who did his PhD in Technology and Development from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. He is researching the field of High Dimensional Data and feature interactions. His current focus is on developing new methodologies for feature selection and handling missing data. His research is a confluence of statistical and machine learning thoughts. His experience focused on understanding the real-world problems, primarily public health in data scenarios not suitable for statistical analysis. He has experience in the field of data science, systems thinking, simulation and modeling, multi-criteria decision making and qualitative analysis. He likes to explore the marginalised and the uncharted territories of science. Beyond research, he likes to spend time with nature as well as learn new cultures and perspectives of people.
PubMed:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25233373/
Xuan Li
Title: Senior biostatistician
I am Xuan Li working as Biostatiscian in Department of Biostatistics at Princess Margaret Cancer Center. I obtained my PhD in statistics from York University in 2019. My PhD thesis focuses on analysis of three types of high-dimensional genetic data and develops different statistical methods based on study aims and data characteristics. I tend to incorporate my past experiences into current work and studies. My current research interests are Biostatistics, Statistical modeling and Clinical trial design and analysis.
I have been working on Breathomics data combined with relevant demographical and clinical features in order to build a classifier capable of distinguishing positive cancer patients from healthy never smoker controls. Another important project is to use meta analysis to explore the proportion of updated Phase III randomized controlled trialsand factors that are associated with updating the trials.
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Eshetu G. Atenafu
Title: Senior biostatistician
Jessica Weiss
Eshetu G. Atenafu (M.Sc, PStat) joined the Biostatistics department in November of 2010, as a Senior Biostatistician to get involved in collaborative research at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto. Prior to joining University Health Network, he was working as a Statistical analyst and Biostatistician at the Hospital for Sick Children for 8 years. His involvement in such collaborative research includes design considerations of a study, providing randomization sequence for clinical trials and monitoring randomization, analysis of data, interpretation of results and preparation of manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals. He has more than 200 publications as an author/co-author in the peer-reviewed medical and methodological journals such as Blood, JCO, Annals of Oncology, JAMA Oncology and European Urology. His RG Score is 47.13 and H-index is 32 with more than 4,000 citations. His primary work interests include survival, longitudinal and categorical data analysis, simulation study, meta-analysis, change/break point analysis, reference interval estimation and clinical trials at different levels of collaboration.
PubMed:
Jessica Weiss is a senior biostatistician at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. She primarily collaborates with the Lung cancer and Radiation Medicine Program (RMP) groups on observational and translational research projects. She completed her master’s degree in the Biostatistics Collaborative Program at the University of Western Ontario. Her primary research interests are time to event analysis, longitudinal analysis,biomarker research,and data visualization. Jessica also serves as a Biostatistician on the Data Safety and Monitoring Board.
PubMed:
Title: Senior biostatistician
Jie Su
Title: Senior biostatistician
Ms. Su mainly collaborates with the Princess Margaret Head and Neck Site Group. She obtained her Master’s degree in Statistics from University of Toronto. The studies that she conducted statistical analysis for include new staging system construction, association examination between survival outcomes and the potential prognostic factors, biomarker signature identification, nomogram construction, analysis of quality of life, meta-analysis and prediction ability evaluation. She has coauthored for more than 50 cancer research papers since 2011.
She reviewed protocols from statistical view as a member of UHN Research Ethics Board from 2016 to 2019. She was a member of CCRU Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) on 2015.
PubMed:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=jie+su+toronto&size=50
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=susie+su+toronto&size=50
Yuhua Zhang
Mr. Yuhua Zhang is a Research Analyst II (Senior Analyst) inthe Biostatistics Department at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. He focuses on data management, database design, SAS programming, statistical data analysis and cancer clinical trial study. He holds two master degrees in science, which are Applied Mathematics and Statistics, and he has many years’ experience in statistical data analysis and more than 16 years’ experience in computer science. He has published 18 papers in bioinformatics, computer sciences and mathematics.
PubMed:
Title: Senior Research Analyst
Tyler Pittman
Tyler has a background in statistics, cancer surveillance and precision agriculture. He did his BSc and MSc at the University of Alberta, and attempted a PhD program. In his spare time, he enjoys trying new foods and exploring the inner-city neighbourhoods of Toronto. He primarily assists clinical and research staff with coding help for data integration and analysis, using R, REDCap and SAS.
Pubmed:
Title: Senior Research Analyst
Lisa W. Le
Principal Statician
Lisa W. Le is a Principal Statistician at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PMCC), University Health Network (UHN). She has collaborated with many PIs at UHN, and awarded multiple grants on cancer clinical research. Ms. Le's research interests focus on statistical methodology, clinical trial design and analysis, personalized medicine, translational medicine, predictive model and machine learning. She has published 110+ peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals and over 100 published conference abstracts (h-index 34, i10-index 73, Google Scholar Citations).
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Amy Liu
Principal BioStatician
Dr. Zhihui (Amy) Liu is a Principal Biostatistician at Princess Margaret (PM) Cancer Centre, and a status Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She graduated from McGill University with a PhD in Biostatistics and studied methods for randomized screening trials and causal inference. At the same time she worked as a statistician for the Kidney Cancer Research Network of Canada. Later at Cancer Care Ontario, she gained extensive experience with population statistics, system planning, as well as regional comparisons of cancer, renal and palliative care delivery. She joined the PM in 2018 and has been primarily collaborating with the Radiation Medicine Program, and her current methodological interests include radiotherapy-induced normal tissue complication probability modeling.
Pubmed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Liu+Amy+Toronto
Bo Chen
Bo Chen is a post-doctoral fellow supervised by Dr. Wei Xu. He completed his PhD from Department of Statistical Science, University of Toronto. His PhD thesis focused on statistical methods for X chromosome inclusive genome-wide association study. at Princess Margaret Cancer Center, his current research area focuses on methodology development on modelling correlated microbiome sequencing data with longitudinal measures.
Pubmed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Chen+Bo+Toronto
Post Doctoral Fellow
Osvaldo Espin-Garcia
Osvaldo Espin-Garcia is a Senior Biostatistician in the Biostatistics Department at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Osvaldo is a PhD candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Biostatistics Division. He also holds a Master of Mathematics in Statistics-Biostatistics from the University of Waterloo and a Bachelor in Actuarial Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Osvaldo's research interests lie in developing novel methodologies in statistical genetics, genetic epidemiology, design and analysis of two-phase studies, microbiome data analysis and joint models of longitudinal and time-to-event data. Osvaldo has been awarded studentships from CIHR STAGE (Strategic Training for Advanced Genetic Epidemiology) and OICR BTI (Biostatistics Training Initiative) programs.
Pubmed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Espin-Garcia+Osvaldo+Toronto
Senior Biostatistician
Mei Dong
I’m a research associate and I joined the team in 2019 after obtaining my master’s degree in Statistics from University of Saskatchewan. I have been working on a wide variety of projects including high dimensional data analysis, predictive modeling, mendelian randomization and observational studies. I’m interested in investigating how genetic, microbiome, and environmental factors will affect disease outcomes and their interactions.
Pubmed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Dong+Mei+Toronto
Research Associate
Manjula Maganti
Manjula Maganti is a Senior Biostatistician in the Department of Biostatistics at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre since 2012 to present. Prior to that she worked as Biostatistician in the Division of Cardiac Surgery at Toronto General Hospital from 2001-2012. She received her Master’s degree from the University of Western Ontario and Bachelor’s degree from India. She is involved in study design, methodology and outcomes research. Her research interests are time to event analysis, longitudinal data analysis, categorical data analysis, generalized linear models and matched case control studies using propensity score matching.
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Dr. Sareh Keshavarzi
Dr. Sareh Keshavarzi joined the department of Biostatistics in 2019, as a Senior Biostatistician. Prior to joining University Health Network, she has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children for 4 years, working on genetic association studies of type 1 diabetes’ complications such as cardiovascular diseases. Sareh has been awarded the CIHR STAGE (Strategic Training for Advanced Genetic Epidemiology) fellowship (2016-2018). So far, she has been the first and co-author of more than 70 peer-reviewed publications in statistical, clinical, and genetics journals.
In her current position at UHN, she primarily collaborates with the Head & Neck Cancer Program groups on clinical and translational research projects. Her primary research interests are statistical genetics, clinical trials designs and analysis, and advanced statistical model development. Sareh is also a member of UHN Research Ethics Board.
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Senior Biostatician
Katherine Lajkosz
Katherine Lajkosz is a senior biostatistician at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. She joined the team in 2019 and primarily collaborates with the Genitourinary team. She completed her MSc in Biostatistics at Queen's University and has previously worked as a statistician at ICES and the Waterloo Wellington LHIN. Her primary research interests include survival analysis, predictive modeling and machine learning.
Senior Biostatician
Divya Sharma
Dr. Divya Sharma has a PhD degree in Computer Science, with a specialisation in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, from Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. As a postdoctoral fellow at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, she is applying her expertise in advanced machine learning techniques for solving important problems in the area of Health Research. Her postdoctoral research deals with developing novel neural network models in the area of disease prediction using microbiome data. She has been awarded the CIHR STAGE (Strategic Training for Advanced Genetic Epidemiology) fellowship (2020-2022). She aims to extend her research to medical image analysis along with genomic data analysis to aid interdisciplinary research in the areas of Computer Science and Health Research.
Post Doctoral Research Fellow