Biostatistics

Brian D. Chen

*** ******** **** **. ****, NC ****9

919-***-**** (Cell) *******@****.***.***

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2021- 2026)

• Biostatistics, PhD

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017-2021)

• Biostatistics, BSPH and Mathematics, B.A.

Related Coursework

• Design and Analysis of Clinical Trials

• Theory and Methods for Survival Analysis

• Longitudinal Data Analysis

• Statistical Methods in Human Genetics

Work Experience

Polygenic Risk Methods in Diverse Populations (PRIMED) Consortium Graduate Research Assistant (August 2021 – Present)

• Testing methods and writing cloud workflows to benchmark polygenic risk scores to predict disease and health outcomes for a genetically diverse population.

Yun Li Group

Graduate Research Assistant (August 2021 – Present)

• Developing a method that leverages table, images and text data of multi-omics in a mixture of experts (MLP, CNN, and transformer) to predict complex diseases.

• Developing a method to improve polygenic risk scores in admixed individuals by incorporating local ancestry information and functional annotations using a penalized regression framework.

• Developed a method using GWAS and penalized regression for protein prediction and associating the predicted level to a disease outcome for Proteome Wide Association Studies.

• Analyzing metabolite and blood cell traits associations using linear models to guide future metabolomic studies. Alexion Pharmaceuticals

Biostatistics Intern (June 2025 – August 2025)

• Ran large scale simulations using R and a high-performance computing cluster to test a novel method for retrieved dropout imputation for recurrent events.

Teaching Assistant

Teaching Assistant (January 2024 – May 2024; January 2025 – May 2025)

• Led recitations and held office hours for master’s and PhD level biostatistics classes. Di Wu Statistical Bioinformatics Group

Undergraduate Research Assistant (June 2018 – May 2021)

• Analyzed differential expression and single cell analysis using Seurat for HIV patients. Afficient Academy

Teacher (October 2019 – August 2020)

• Taught an intensive 7-class course preparing middle school students for the AMC 8 Math competition and a 15- class summer course on competition math for middle schoolers. Mei Lab

Undergraduate Research Assistant (June 2019 – September 2019)

• Analyzed single cell RNA sequencing data in eye tissue to identify biomarkers for certain stem cells using Seurat. This will help better understand disease diagnosis, tissue regeneration, and scar healing in the eye. Pharstat

Intern (July 2018 – August 2018)

• Examined clinical trial protocols and the programs used for data analysis to better understand the statistical operations of clinical trials.

Select Publications

Chen, B. D., Tapia, A., Boerwinkle, E., Clish, C. B., Gerszten, R., Graff, M., Mohlke, K. L., Morrison, A. C., Pathmasiri, W., Rich, S. S., Rotter, J. I., Rushing, B. R., Sumner, S., Tracy, R. P., Young, K. L., Yu, B., Thyagarajan, B., Reiner, A. P., Li, Y., & Raffield, L. (2025). Association of metabolomics measurements with blood cell phenotypes. Blood Cells, Molecules & Diseases, 117(102966), 102966. Kharitonova, E. V., Sun, Q., Ockerman, F., Chen, B., Zhou, L. Y., Hysong, M. R., Tuftin, B., Cao, H., Mathias, R. A., Auer, P. L., Ober, C., Raffield, L. M., Reiner, A. P., Cox, N. J., Kelada, S. N. P., Tao, R., & Li, Y. (2025). EndoPRS: Incorporating endophenotype information to improve polygenic risk scores for clinical endpoints-A study in asthma. The American Journal of Human Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.03.008 Sun, Q., Horimoto, A. R. V. R., Chen, B., Ockerman, F., Mohlke, K. L., Blue, E., Raffield, L. M., & Li, Y. (2025). Opportunities and challenges of local ancestry in genetic association analyses. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 112(4), 727–740.

Chen, B. D., Lee, C., Tapia, A. L., Reiner, A. P., Tang, H., Kooperberg, C., Manson, J. E., Li, Y., & Raffield, L. M. (2024). Proteome-wide association study using cis and trans variants and applied to blood cell and lipid-related traits in the Women’s Health Initiative study. Genetic Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1002/gepi.22578 Song, Z., Chen, B., Tsai, C.-H., Wu, D., Liu, E., Hawkins, I. S., Phan, A., Auman, J. T., Tao, Y., & Mei, H. (2022). Differentiation Trajectory of Limbal Stem and Progenitor Cells under Normal Homeostasis and upon Corneal Wounding. Cells, 11(13). https://doi.org/10.3390/cells11131983 Conference Attendance

• International Genetic Epidemiology Society Journal Club (January 2026) – Proteome wide association studies on Women’s Health Initiative dataset [talk].

• American Society of Human Genetics (November 2025) – Polygenic risk scores in admix individuals by incorporating functional annotations [poster].

• American Society of Human Genetics (November 2024) – Polygenic risk scores in admix individuals by incorporating functional annotations [talk].

• American Society of Human Genetics (November 2023) – Proteome wide association studies on Women’s Health Initiative dataset [talk].

• American Society of Human Genetics (October 2022) – Proteome wide association studies on Women’s Health Initiative dataset [poster].

• Spring 2022 PAGE Meeting (March 2022) –Difficulties of metabolite harmonization across different study cohorts

[poster].

Computer Language Proficiency

• R • Python • PyTorch • SAS

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