People
Wei Xu
Dr. Wei Xu is a Clinician Scientist at University Health Network. He is also a Professor of Biostatistics at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. He leads the Biostatistics Department at the University Health Network. 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 40 grants on clinical and translational research studies. So far, he has published over 480 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals on statistics, bioinformatics, medical science, and human genetics. His H-index is 77 with more than 30,000 citations.
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Clinician Scientist
CLINICAL RESEARCH & DRUG DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Lisa Wang
Principal Biostatistician
Cancer Clinical Research Team Lead
Lisa Wang is a Principal Biostatistician at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and Assistant Professor in the Biostatistics Division at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is also a member of the Ontario Cancer Research Ethics Board. She graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 2003 and joined PMCC in 2004. Mrs. Lisa Wang has been the sole Biostatistician for the Princess Margaret Hospital Consortium (PMHC) over the past 11 years, which has led more than 100 early-phase academic trials in Canada. Many of these studies incorporate novel endpoints, designs, assessment and validation of innovative therapeutic strategies for cancer, including molecular targeted therapies. She was the Chair of Data Safety Monitor Board (DSMB) of PMHC from 2007-2016 and a member of the PMCC 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 a first and co-author of more than 100 publications, in major statistical, medical research book chapters and journals.
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Lisa W. Le
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 42, i10-index 102, Google Scholar Citations).
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Principal Statistician
Xuan Li
Xuan Li is a senior biostatistician at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. She graduated from York University with a PhD in Statistical inference for high dimensional genetic data. The thesis focuses on analysis of different types of high-dimensional genetic data and develops proper statistical methods based on study aims and data characteristics. She joined the PM in 2019 and has been primarily collaborating with Drug Development Program (DDP) groups and PIs from Department of Medical Imaging on various research projects. Her current primary research interests are clinical trial design and analysis, time to event analysis, longitudinal analysis, and robust statistical modeling.
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Senior Biostatistician
Katrina Hueniken
Katrina Hueniken is a biostatistician at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, working primarily with the head and neck cancer program. She holds Master of Public Health and a Master of Science in Biostatistics, both from the University of Toronto. Katrina’s work focuses on clinical epidemiology research of cancer prognosis and patient quality of life. She has expertise in real world analysis and survival modelling, and is particularly interested in statistical methods to advance personalized medicine and improve patient care.
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Senior Biostatistician
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.
PubMed:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Maganti+M+Toronto
Senior Biostatistician
Eshetu G. Atenafu
Senior Biostatistician
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.
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DATA SCIENCE TEAM
Tyler Pittman
Tyler has a background in statistics, cancer surveillance and precision agriculture. He has a MSc and did coursework for a PhD. Areas of focus include social network analysis, hierarchical modeling and geospatial analysis. He assists clinical and research staff with programming help for data integration, visualization and analysis, using primarily R and SAS.
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Senior Research Associate
Data Science / Analyst Team Lead
Yuhua Zhang
Mr. Yuhua Zhang is a Research Associate in the 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.
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Research Associate
Lei Qin
Lei Qin is a Research Associate at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PMCC), UHN. He joins Biostatistics Department in 2021 after accomplished training in MSc Biostatistics program in University of Toronto. Previously he has served as Senior Research Technologist in the Hospital for Sick Children, Postdoctoral Research fellow in Cancer Research Institute at Queen’s University, Biologist in Shanghai Center for Bioinformatics Technology. As a member of Research Analyst Team, he provides support to study and administrative activities conducted in the Department and CCRU at PMCC.
Research Associate
OBSERVATIONAL TEAM
Amy Liu
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.
Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=ZAoV6pYAAAAJ
Principal Biostatistician
Observational Research Team Lead
Shiyi Chen
Senior Biostatistician
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.
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Jie Su
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 has conducted statistical analysis for include: new staging system construction, association examination between survival outcomes and 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 a 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) during 2015.
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Senior Biostatistician
Philip Ye
Xiang Y (Philip) Ye is a Senior Biostatistician at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. He has a MSc in Math and Statistics from Univ. of Victoria and completed Ph.D program (all but dissertation) in biostatistics from State University of New York at Albany. He joined Biostatistics Dept at PMCC in Oct. 2022, primarily collaborating with the Radiation Medicine Program and other UHN scientists. Before joining UHN, he had worked as a statistician with Mount Sinai Hospital for more than 10+ years, providing statistical support for observational and RCT studies, including big data management (eg CIHI DAD), sophisticated data analysis and protocol/CIHR grant development, and coauthored more than 100+ peer-reviewed papers and had been a co-applicant for several CIHR funded studies.
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Senior Biostatistician
Anna Santiago
Senior Biostatistician
Anna T. Santiago is a senior biostatistician at the UHN Biostatistics Department. She joined the department in March 2022 and previously worked as a biostatistician at Baycrest Health Sciences and the University of Toronto. She received her MSc Biostatistics from the University of Toronto with a thesis on dimension reduction. She is currently engaged in collaborative research with the Radiation Medicine Program and UHN researchers. Her research interests include analysis of primary and secondary data, exploratory multivariate analysis, and survival analysis.
Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=-A01eDsAAAAJ&hl=en
TRANSLATIONAL TEAM
Lisa Avery
Principal Biostatistician
Translational Research Team Lead
Dr. Lisa Avery is a principal biostatistician and assistant professor with over 15 years experience as an independent statistician. She joined the biostatistics group at UHN in 2020 after a year lecturing at the University of Otago. Her doctoral work involved statistical methods in respondent driven sampling, a sampling technique for marginalised hard to reach populations. She has been involved in a number of longitudinal child development studies and outcome measurement projects, as well as cancer research and biomarker analysis. Her research interests include data visualisation, longitudinal analysis, measurement quality and measurement development.
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Osvaldo Espin-Garcia
Osvaldo Espin-Garcia is a Principal Biostatistician in the Biostatistics Department at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Osvaldo has a PhD, and is an Assistant Professor 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.
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Principal Biostatistician
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.
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Senior Biostatistician
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 Senior Biostatistician, she applies her expertise in advanced machine learning techniques for solving important problems in the area of Health Research. Her postdoctoral research at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health dealt with developing novel neural network models in the area of disease prediction using microbiome data. She was 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.
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Senior Biostatistician
Zeynep Baskurt
Senior Biostatistician
Zeynep Baskurt joined the Biostatistics Department at Princess Margaret Cancer Center as a Senior Biostatistician in September 2022, and has been primarily working with the head and neck team. She holds a PhD in Statistical Sciences from University of Toronto. Her thesis work included genetic association analysis using evidential paradigm and inferential theories in Bayesian paradigm. Prior to joining the Biostatistics Department, she was working as a Research Associate in the Genetics and Genome Biology Department at the Hospital for Sick Children, where she developed statistical methodology for genetic data and contributed gene modifier studies in Cystic Fibrosis. Her research interests include correlated data analysis, time to event and longitudinal data analysis, statistical genetics and Bayesian statistical modeling.
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Yangqing Deng
Dr. Yangqing Deng is a postdoctoral fellow who joined the Biostatistics Department at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in 2021. He got his PhD in biostatistics from the University of Minnesota with his thesis focused on genetic testing with conditional analysis and summary statistics. His major research areas include statistical genetics and causal inference, as well as developing new methodology for clinical trials. Besides methodology research, he also enjoys collaboration projects on different types of data and always looks forward to exploring new areas with new ideas.
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Post Doctoral Fellow
Yuliang Shi
Yuliang Shi is a research analyst and joined the Biostatistics Department in 2020. He is a Ph.D. student in Biostatistics at the University of Waterloo. Before that, he attended the Co-op program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre from 2020 to 2021, supervised by Dr. Wei Xu. Most of his works focused on survival analysis and genetic data analysis programmed on R and LINUX. His research interests include causal inference, missing data, and survival analysis.
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Research Analyst
Bo Chen
Bo Chen is a senior biostatistician who joined the Biostatistics Department in August 2023. He received his M.Sc. in Biostatistics from McGill University and his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of Toronto. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on causal variance decomposition for profiling the performance of hospitals. Currently, he has been primarily collaborating with the Toronto Center for Liver Disease on various research projects. His primary research interests include clinical trial design and analysis, causal inference, and statistical applications in liver disease.
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Senior Biostatistician
APPLIED CLINICAL RESEARCH TEAM
Erik Lovblom
Erik completed his PhD in Biostatistics from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto in 2022. Research interests lie in joint models for longitudinal and survival data, including multivariate longitudinal and survival outcomes, and in dynamic prediction modelling and evaluation.
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Principal Biostatistician
POST-DOCTORAL FELLOWS & PHD STUDENTS
Adam Zhong
Yuan (Adam) Zhong is a postdoctoral fellow and joins the Biostatistics Department at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in 2023. He graduated from York University with a Ph.D. degree specialized in statistics. His recent research is driven by challenges in integrated heterogeneous learning tasks with high-dimensional and complex data structure, which includes the development of statistical methodologies, and computational algorithms.
Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Hb-QCywAAAAJ
Post Doctoral Fellow
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.
Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=L--4tCAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Research Associate