As part of their internships with the Biostatistics Core, second year students Zinan Chen, Xin Liu, and Victor Poon gave presentations of their work during the past semester. Zinan Chen presented her work on “Unfavorable versus favorable intermediate risk in prostate cancer,” Xin Liu discussed “Perspectives On Clergy Health Problems, and Victor Poon examined "Analysis of Pulmonary Hypertension in Patients with Mitral Valve Surgery.”
Zinan Chen has been working with Lauren Howard of the Biostatistics Core and under Dr. Stephen Freedland's prostate cancer research team. In her presentation, she introduced a project she worked on using survival analysis. She validated this classification method for intermediate risk prostate cancer by comparing the cancer outcomes. This new method allows doctors to group patients based on their baseline characteristics and provide better, more targeted help for them.
In the study that Victor Poon completed, “Analysis of Pulmonary Hypertension in Patients with Mitral Valve Surgery,” survival analysis was utilized to examine the differences in expected time to death between patients with and without pulmonary hypertension pre mitral valve surgery. Results from a preliminary analysis suggest that patients with pulmonary hypertension pre mitral valve surgery have lower survival when compared to patients without pulmonary hypertension pre mitral valve surgery.
Xin Liu has been doing her internship as a collaborative biostatistician with Clergy Health Initiative Team funded by Duke Endowment, part of the Duke Divinity School. She discussed an observational study based on the clergy health initiative longitudinal survey data collected in 2014. She used hierarchical modelling to evaluate the effect of taking international Sabbath day on clergy's physical, mental health and spiritual vitality. Her presentation successfully interpreted the findings, how she handled the challenges of missing data and confounding variables."
All Masters of Biostatistics degree candidates complete a practicum which usually includes an internship. This allows students to develop their analytic ability, biological knowledge, and communication skills. The practicum is typically completed during the summer after the first year, but can be completed during the second year.