Our Alumni: Joy Shu Jiang

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Joy Shu Jiang (BSc (Statistics and Actuarial Science), 2015, Simon Fraser University, MSc (Statistics), 2016, University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. (Statistics), 2018, University of Waterloo) is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious MERIT award from the National Institute of Health. In 2022, she was awarded the 40 under 40 Public Health Catalyst Awards by the Boston Congress of Public Health.

Joy Shu Jiang was a consultant at the SCCRU between 2017 and 2018. She has helped many graduate students and faculty members who sought statistical support at the statistics help desk. During her term of service, Joy also worked closely with Dr. Edward Lum (School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of New South Wales) for longitudinal analysis of glaucoma progression. To better understand the data in the collaborative study, she visited the lab to observe the data collection process of human cornea measurements.

During her job interviews, interviewers were impressed by her consulting experience because it gives her an edge in communicating statistical concepts to collaborators with a minimal statistics background. In her current position within the medical school, her previous consulting experiences have helped tremendously in team science projects that typically involve scientists in different fields working together in solving real world problems. 

Joy's primary research is in developing novel statistical methods for survival data under various complex settings. Recently, she is working on improving decision-making by predicting the future course of disease and making inferences at the patient level using subject-specific profiles that may vary over time. This may include biomarker trajectories and high-dimensional digital imaging data.

Find out more about Joy's latest research direction.

A picture of Joy Shu Jiang