Nancy Zhang

I came to statistics through biology. While I was finishing a mathematics degree at Stanford, the first draft of the human genome was nearing completion, microarrays were beginning to change how biological research was done, and the term “GWAS” had not yet been coined. The idea that quantitative models, applied to data from high-throughput experiments, could give a systemic understanding of biology was hard to resist.

Being a mathematics major, though, had rather little to do with knowing what to do with data. So I went on to a PhD in statistics, and picked up the biology I needed along the way.