Student Highlight – Fang Qiu is a PhD student in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) College of Public Health. She entered the PhD program on a part-time basis, and has now finished the first year of her doctoral program.  She is originally from ZaoZhuang, a small city in China.

After obtaining a master’s degree in statistics, Fang started to work for UNMC as a full-time statistical coordinator. She works collaboratively with investigators across the UNMC campus on experiment design, data management, data analysis, interpretation, and manuscript writing of health-related research studies.  As a statistical coordinator, Fang encountered several studies for which the data could not be analyzed using standard statistical methods, and she sought the assistance of faculty in the COPH Department of Biostatistics. These consultations with faculty led Fang to decide to pursue a PhD in biostatistics so that she could learn how to develop innovative statistical methods that would enable her to solve complex problems in medicine and public health. Fang’s research interests include clinical trials, survival data analysis, high-throughput data analysis, and meta-analysis.

After earning her PhD, Fang hopes to continue contributing to the prevention and cure of disease as a professional researcher and educator. Fang has found COPH faculty and staff to be very helpful and thoughtful. She also appreciates the encouraging learning environment at the COPH.