Song Lab

Department of Biostatistics

Lab News

February 2024: Song Lab organized a Lunar new year outing with lab members. We enjoyed happy bowling time and celebrated the new year.

November 2023: Song Lab had a Thanksgiving dinner with lab members. All of the members enjoyed wonderful time!

November 2023: Song Lab had a half-day fall hike at Kensington Park to enjoy the beautiful lake view, fresh air and celebrating the birthday of Dr. Song.

August, 2023: Song Lab welcomes two new postdoc research fellows and three new PhD trainees in the fall semester, 2023.

July, 2023: Congratulations to Lap Sum Chan for his success in defending his PhD thesis "Statistical Methods for Multi-omics Data in Observational Studies" on July 28, 2023. Dr. Chan will start his postdoc training at the Department of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota.

July, 2023: Congratulations to Margaret Banker for successfully defending her PhD dissertation "Functional Data Analysis Methods for Analyzing Accelerometry Data in Mobile Health" on July 28, 2023. Dr. Banker will join Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Northwestern University as a faculty member.

June, 2023: Soumik Purkayashta received, at the WNAR held during June 18-21, 2023, the Winner of the 2023 WNAR Student Most Outstanding Written Paper Award and the Runner-up of the 2023 WNAR Student Most Outstanding Presentation Award. At WNAR, Soumik presented his first dissertation paper "Asymmetric Predictability: an information theoretic approach to causal inference". Congratulations to Soumik for such awards!

April, 2023: Soumik Purkayastha was granted the U-M School of Public Health 2023 Rising Star Award. Big congratulations to Soumik!

Previous News

2022 News

May, 2022: Margaret Banker has won the Student Paper Award of the 2022 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium for her paper, Supervised Learning of Physical Activity Features from Functional Accelerometer Data. This is one of Banker's dissertation papers. She will present her award-winning paper on Tuesday, June 21 in Gainesville, Florida.

April, 2022: Peter Song received the 2022 U-M SPH Excellence in Research Award.

2021 News

December, 2021: A recently published paper An Efficient Segmentation Algorithm to Estimate Sleep Duration from Actigraphy Data received the 2022 Statistics in Biosciences Best Paper Award. The first author, Dr. Jonggyu Baek, was a postdoc at Song Lab and now Assistant Professor at UMass Medical School. The second author, Margaret Banker, is currently a PhD student at Song Lab. We are invited for a presentation on this paper at the upcoming 2022 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium in June 19-22, 2022 in Gainesville, Florida.

December, 2021: Congratulations to Mengtong Hu on receiving the ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Awards for the 2022 ENAR Spring Meeting. This award recognizes her paper entitled Collaborative causal inference with a distributed data-sharing management.

November, 2021: Song Lab had a thanksgiving lunch with a former lab trainee Mathieu Bray.

November, 2021: Song Lab organized and participated in a UM-CMU-Harvard Joint Lab Meeting on November 13, 2021 to exchange ideas on adaptive learning, text data analysis, and social network analysis.

October, 2021: Song Lab had a half-day fall hiking at Birds Hills Nature Area to enjoy the foliage and fresh air.

September, 2021: Song Lab had a fall picnic to celebrate an in-person fall semester after eight months remote learning!

July, 2021: Congratulations to Wei Hao who successfully defended her PhD dissertation "Some Statistical Methods for Causal Mediation Pathway Analysis" on July 21, 2021. Dr. Hao will join the Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan as an assistant research professor.

July, 2021: Congratulations to Yiwang Zhou for successfully defending her PhD dissertation "Some Statistical Learning Methods for Procuring Individualized Treatment Rules in Personalized Healthcare" on July 15, 2021. Dr. Zhou will join Department of Biostatistics, St Jude Children's Research Hospital as a faculty member.

January, 2021: Congratulations to Wei Hao for her receiving a Young Investigator Award by the ASA Section on Statistics in Epidemiology. This award was given to her paper "A simultaneous likelihood test for joint mediation effects of multiple mediators".

2020 News

December, 2020: In year 2020, Song Lab is pround of graduating 5 PhD students and publishing 27 peer-reviewed papers. Thanks to all lab members for their great efforts during these difficult times. In particular, Song Lab has developed several epidemiological prediction models and software for the projection of COVID-19 pandemic. One paper published in Harvard Data Science Review took seven rounds of revisions before it was accepted for publication. Another paper "A review of multi-compartment infectious disease models" published in International Statistical Review 88(2), 462-513 took only 11 days of review from submission to acceptance! We appreciate the great dedication of the statistical community to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

December, 2020: Congratulations to Mengtong Hu for recieving the 2020 Outstanding Graduate Student Instuctor Award at the Dapartment of Biostatistics, University of Michigan.

December, 2020: Kudos to Soumik Purkayastha for recieving the 2020 Cornell Award for his excellent academic performance at the Dapartment of Biostatistics, University of Michigan.

August, 2020: Congratulations to Wen Wang for her success in defending her PhD dissertation "L0 Constraint Optimization, Homogeneity Fusion, and Mediation Analyses" on August 14, 2020. Dr. Wang will begin her Postdoc at the Univeristy of Michigan Kidney Empidemiology and Cost Center.

July, 2020: Advised jointly by Dr. Douglas Schaubel from the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Peter Song from University of Michigan, Lili Wang successfully defended her PhD dissertation "Flexible Methods for the Analysis of Clustered Event Data in Observational Studies" on July 28, 2020. Congratulations! Dr. Wang will join Google Inc. as a data scientist in August, 2020.

June, 2020: A review paper entilted "A Review of Multi-Comparment Infectious Disease Models" was recently accepted by International Statistical Review. This paper made a new record for the review process; it took only 11 days from submission to acceptance! This is an amazing record! Thanks to the journal editors' tremendous effort.

June, 2020: Led by Yiwang Zhou, after seven rounds of revisions, a paper entilted "A Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Prediction Model to Inform County-Level COVID-19 Risk in the United States" was recently accepted by Harvard Data Science Review. The journal will publish the key correspondences together with the paper between the author and editor, associate editor, dataviz editor and five reviewers. There are many `secrete' communications in the process of the paper revisions that should be fun to read!

May, 2020: Led by Lili Wang, a COVID-19 research paper entilted "An epidemiological forecast model and software assessing interventions on COVID-19 epidemic in China" was recently accepted by Journal of Data Science as a discussion paper. We are honored to exchange our opinions on the modeling of COVID-19 infection dynamics via extensive discussions with scientists from Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

May, 2020: Congratulations to Lan Luo who successfully defended her PhD dissertation "Renewable estimation and incremental inference with streaming health datasets" on May 29, 2020. Dr. Luo will join the Department of Statistics, University of Iowa as an assistant professor.

May, 2020: Congratulations to Emily Hector for a successful defense on her PhD dissertation "Distributed estimation and inference for the analysis of big biomedical data" on May 13, 2020. Dr. Hector will join the Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University as an assistant professor.

May, 2020: Congratulations to Joseph Naiman for successfully defending his PhD dissertation "Functional regression and selection with applications in accelerometer data analysis" on May 12, 2020. Dr. Naiman began to work at the DTE Energy Financial Group as a data scientist.

March 2020: Updates of the progress on both our epidemiological forecast model and software. Here is the link to the technical report available on medRxiv; here is the link to the R software package eSIR available in the GitHub with the user's manual; here is the link to online prediction of COVID-19 trend in China.

February 2020: Former and current lab members worked together in the past few weeks and developed a data analysis toolbox for the analysis of novel coronavirus, COVID-19 in China. Here are the first stack of slides and the second stack of slides of the lectures on the toolbox; here is the link to the recorded lectures.

2019 News

November 2019: Congratulations to Emily Hector on receiving the Excellence in Research Award and to Lan Luo on receiving the Excellence in Research Honorable Mention given by the Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan.

November 2019: Three lab members, Emily Hector, Lan Luo and Yiwang Zhou, presented their dissertation research papers at the Workshop on BFF (Bayes, Fiducial and Frequentist) Paradigm in Data Integration, Machine Learning and Applications, on Novemeber 2, 2019 at U-M School of Public Health.

August 2019: Congratulations to Emily Hector who received Honorable Mention of the Gertrude M. Cox Scholarship at the 2019 JSM, sponsored by the American Statistical Association (ASA) Committee on Women in Statistics and the Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS).

June 2019: Congratulations to Margaret Banker for her co-first author paper "Early pregnancy exposure to endocrine disrupting chemical mixtures are associated with inflammatory changes in maternal and neonatal circulation" being selected as the Extramural Papers of the Month by NIEHS. Read the detail from the NIEHS Environmental Factor website.

May 2019: Two former lab trainees, Drs. Lu Tang and Mathieu Bray, came back to attend the graduation ceremony. Best wishes to both of you!

May 2019: Kudos to Lan Luo for her completion of dissertation proposal "Renewable estimation and incremental inference with streaming health datasets".

April 2019: Song Lab had a farewell dinner with Dr. Xichen She who successfully completed his postdoctoral training at Song Lab during March, 2017 - April, 2019. Dr. She began to work at Integated.AI Inc. in Toronto, Canada. Best wishes to Xichen for his future endeavor!

March 2019: The UM-SJTU Collaborative Initiative Project "Learning impact of air pollution on kidney disease epidemiology in US and east China using big public health data" held a joint meeting at UM School of Public Health. Chengwen Luo presented her research work done during her visit at UM Department of Biostatistics as a visiting scholar.

March 2019: At the 2019 ENAR, Song Lab demonstrated both reserach excellence and had some happy hours with former lab members.

March 2019: Kudos to Emily Hector for her success in dissertation proposal "Distributed estimation and inference for the analysis of big biomedical data".

February 2019: Congratulations to Lan Luo on receiving Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship that will fund her research on streaming health data analysis in year 2019-2020!

2018 News

December 2018: Song Lab's End-of-Semester & Christmas Dining-out to celebrate all great accomplishments that we achieved together in year 2018!

December 2018: Congratulations to Lan Luo on receiving the ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Awards for the 2019 ENAR Spring Meeting. This award recognizes her paper entitled Real-time Regression Analysis of Streaming Health Datasets.

December 2018: Congratulations to Mathieu Bray for a successful defense of his thesis, entitled Advances in Methods, Algorithms and Software for Optimization and Simulation of Kidney Paired Donation Program. Dr. Bray will join GSK as a biostatistician in early 2019. Best wishes, Mathieu!

Nov 2018: Dr. Heping Zhang from Yale University visited our lab to discuss his lastest research, along with Dr. Lexin Li from UC Berkeley.

Oct 2018: The Song Lab says goodbye to Ling Zhou, who has returned to her native China after having completed her post-doctoral research appointment with the Song Lab.

Oct 2018: Lab members went on a half-day fall hiking at the Pinckney Recreation Area.

Oct 2018: Lan Luo received the 2018 MIDAS award for Most Innovative Use of Data for her poster Renewable Estimation and Incremental Inference in Generalized Linear Models with Streaming Datasets at the MIDAS 2018 Annual Symposium. Congratulations Lan!

Sep 2018: Dr. Ying Wei from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health visited our lab to discuss her lastest research.

Aug 2018: The Song Lab was well represented at JSM 2018 in Vancouver, with Margaret Banker, Mathieu Bray, Emily Hector, Wei Hao, Xichen She, Andrew Whiteman, and Yiwang Zhou all participating in either poster or contributed oral sessions.

Peter Song was also honored as an ASA Fellow: "For scholarly contributions to the theory, methods, and applications in the areas of dependent data, estimating functions, and computational statistics; for significant contributions to collaborative research in medicine and public health; for excellence in teaching and mentoring; and for dedicated service to the profession." Congratulations Peter!

June 2018: Congratulations to Lu Tang for a successful defense of his thesis, entitled Statistical Methods of Data Integration, Model Fusion, and Heterogeneity Detection in Big Biomedical Data Analysis. Dr. Tang will begin his appointment within the faculty of biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall. Best of luck in your future endeavours, Lu!

June 2018: Dr. Rafael Weissbach from the University of Rostock visisted our lab and presented his work on consistency for negative binomial regression with fixed covariates

May 2018: The BFF5 Conference was held from May 6-9, organized by Peter Song, Mathieu Bray, Emily Hector, and Lu Tang, with support from the Departments of Biostatistics and Statistics, the Michigan Institute for Data Science, and the University of Michigan Office of Research.

Apr 2018: Best of luck to Kat Hoffman and Christina Zhou, who have graduated with their MSc degrees from the Biostatistics department. Congratulations Kat and Christina!

Mar 2018: Congratulations to Christina Zhou for winning best poster presentation as judged by the ASA at MSSISS 2018, and to Emily Hector for her hand in organizing the successful event.

Mar 2018: Congratulations to Emily Hector on receiving the John Van Ryzin Award for the Most Outstanding Student Paper at ENAR 2018 in Atlanta! Emily's paper, titled A Distributed and Integrated Method of Moments for High-dimensional Correlated Data Analysis, went through three rounds of reviews and was ranked the top among 123 paper submissions.

2017 News

Nov 2017: Congratulations to Jonggyu Baek who completed his Postdoc training at the lab and joined UMass Medical School as an assistant professor on November 1, 2017.

Oct 2017: Dr. Francis Hui from Australian National University visited our lab and presented his work on LASSO for latent indices, for modeling of ordinal covariates.

Oct 2017: Dr. Xiao-Li Meng from Harvard University visited our lab and participated in discussions with lab members who shared their research projects and interests.

Oct 2017: Lab members went on a half-day fall hiking at the Bird Hills Nature Area in Ann Arbor.

Sep 2017: Dr. Lingzhou Xue and Dr. Ethan Fang from Penn State University visited our lab and pariticipated in discussions with our lab members on various research topics.

Sep 2017: Dr. Haoda Fu from Eli Lilly visited our lab and presented a half-day workshop on the topic of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Precision Medicine.

Aug 2017: Warmest congratulations to Ling Zhou who has been awarded to the 13th Zhong Jiaqing's Mathematics Prize (第十三届钟家庆数学奖) by the Chinese Mathematical Association in year 2017. This is the most prestigious mathematics prize to junior mathematicians in China.

Aug 2017: Margaret Banker received the Student Travel Award for BiostatMCW 2017, Conference of Biostatistics in the Modern Computing Era.

2017: This year marks the 10th anniversary of the book "Correlated Data Analysis: Modeling, Analytics, and Applications" by Dr. Song published in 2007 by Springer: New York. [Cover Page] [Table of Contents] [Book Webpage/Supplementary Material]

Aug 2017: A summer joint meeting between our lab and groups from Notre Dame and Purdue University took place in South Bend, IN.

Feb 2017: Congratulations to Lu and Mathieu, their team won third place in the prediction competition of the Data Challenge for MSSISS 2017!

Feb 2017: The lab started a biweekly journal club on the topic of tensor data analysis methods and applications.

Feb 2017: Dr. Song organized a two-day workshop of recommender system and invited guest speakers Dr. Pengsheng Ji from University of Georgia and Dr. Anru Zhang from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

2016 News

Nov 2016: Doctoral candidate Xichen She from University of Waterloo visited Ann Arbor and presented his work on Missing Data and Fractional Imputation.

Nov 2016: Lu Tang's poster presented at the MIDAS 2016 Annual Symposium Poster Session was awarded for Most Likely Transformative Scientific Impact.

Oct 2016: Dr. Song was invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present a talk on Common Data Linkage Issues: Challenges and Solutions.

Oct 2016: Dr. John Li, a former lab member from San Francisco Bay Area visited Ann Arbor and presented a short course on Spark and Big Data Analytics.

Oct 2016: Dr. Shujie Ma from University of California Riverside visited Ann Arbor and attended a half-day R01 Grant Lab Research Meeting.

Oct 2016: Two lab members, Drs. Jonggyu Baek and Ling Zhou participated Nonparametric Statistics Workshop: Integration of Theory, Methods and Applications and gave poster presentations, respectively.

Sep 2016: Dr. Han Liu from Princeton University visited Ann Arbor and presented a seminar on Combinatorial Inference.

Aug 2016: Dr. Tracy Ke from U Chicago visited Ann Arbor and presented a short course on network data analysis.

Aug 2016: Dr. Peng Zhang from Zhejiang University visited Ann Arbor and talked about his research in dichotomization method and application on the recommeder system.

Jun 2016: Our lab had a joint group meeting with Dr. Alfred Hero's research group on the topic of big data.

May 2016: Dr. Song was invited to deliver a plenary speech at the 10th Lukacs Symposium at BGSU.

2015 News

Sep 2015: Dr. Song organized a half-day workshop on Statistical Methods for Children's Health Research, featuring talks by Dr. Heping Zhang from Yale, Dr. Shujie Ma from UC-Riverside, and Dr. Bin Zhu from NIH/NCI. [Schedule]

Apr 2015: Wei Ding's paper has been reviewed and selected as a winner of the ASA Biopharmaceutical Award and will be presented at the 2015 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, Fort Collins, Co. Congratulations to Wei!

Mar 2015: Yan Zhou has been selected to receive one of the International Biometric Society Eastern North American Region's (ENAR) Distinguished Student Paper Awards for the 2015 ENAR Spring Meeting in Miami, FL. The award recognizes her excellent paper entitled: Regression analysis of networked data. Congratulations to Yan!

Mar 2015: Lu Tang has selected to receive one of the five best poster awards at the 2015 International Biometric Society Eastern North American Region's (ENAR) Spring Meeting in Miami, FL. Congratulations to Lu!

Older News

2013: Dr. Song was awarded to the John von Neumann Visiting Professorship at Technische Universität München for outstanding research in the Mathematical Sciences, which was funded by the Bavarian Ministry of Science, Research and Art.

Apr 2012: Congratulations to Peisong for his receiving the Student Paper Award for the 2012 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium in Boston, MA. The award recognizes his excellent paper entitled "Efficient Estimation For Missing Outcome Data With Surrogate Using Conditional Empirical Likelihood", co-advised by Dr. Lu Wang and Dr. Song.

Mar 2012: Yijiang Li has been selected to receive one of the International Biometric Society's Eastern North American Region (ENAR) Distinguished Student Paper Awards for the 2012 ENAR Spring Meetings in Washington, DC. The award recognizes his excellent paper entitled: Optimization and simulation of an evolving kidney paired donation (KPD) program, co-supervised by Jack Kalbfleisch and Dr. Song. Congratulations to Yijiang!

Mar 2012: Peisong Han has been selected to receive one of the International Biometric Society Eastern North American Region's (ENAR) Distinguished Student Paper Awards for the 2012 ENAR Spring Meetings in Washington DC. The award recognizes his excellent paper on empirical likelihood estimation with missing data, co-supervised by Dr. Lu Wang and Dr. Song. Congratulations to Peisong!

Jan 2012: Congratulations to Peisong Han who received the JSM student paper award from the Biometric Section for his paper entitled "Smoothed empirical likelihood inference for unbalanced longitudinal data". The paper is also selected as one of the finalists for the award from the ASA Nonparametric Statistics Section. This work is based on Peisong Han's first dissertation paper co-supervised by Dr. Lu Wang and Dr. Song.

Mar 2011: Congratulations to Fei Wang who received notification from the SCT Student Scholarship Committee that his abstract was selected as a finalist for the SCT Thomas Chalmers Student Scholarship. He is invited to present his paper, “Validating Data Merging in Longitudinal Studies and Joint Modeling of Merged Longitudinal Data,” at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Clinical Trials, May 15-18, 2011, in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Mar 2009: Bin Zhu has been selected to receive one of the International Biometric Society Eastern North American Region's (ENAR) Distinguished Student Paper Awards for the paper “Stochastic Functional Data Analysis: A Diffusion Model-based Approach” at the 2009 ENAR Spring Meeting in San Antonio, TX. The updated version of this paper also received 2009 ASA Student Paper Competition Award sponsored by the Bayesian Statistical Science Section at 2009 JSM in Washington, DC. This work is co-supervised by Dr. Jeremy Taylor and Dr. Song. Congratulations to Bin!

Group Meetings

Winter 2024

Previous meetings