We are thrilled to celebrate the graduations of three students in our program this week, with Commencement taking place on May 9. Click each individual’s name for more information at their websites.
Kaidi Kang, PhD, completed a dissertation titled A unified effect size index and its application to improve replicability in brain-behavior association studies, with Simon Vandekar as lead advisor. His achievements include winning the 2025 Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award, first-authoring a 2024 paper in Nature and 2023 paper in Psychometrika, and earning the 2024 W.S. Gosset Award for Exceptional Research.
Lisa Levoir, MS, completed a thesis titled Evaluation of supervised learning approaches for assessing heterogeneity of treatment effect in clinical trials, with Bryan Blette as lead advisor. Her accomplishments include winning the 2024 Commodore Award, for her altruistic dedication to enriching the department and graduate program; serving as Biostatistics Graduate Student Association first-year liaison / outreach chair (2023–2024) and vice president (2024–2025); and co-authoring papers published in Annals of the American Thoracic Society, Journal of Virology, and elsewhere.
Maximilian Rohde, PhD, completed a dissertation titled Maximizing statistical efficiency in clinical trials: ordinal longitudinal models and two-stage designs, with Frank Harrell as lead advisor. He is first author of “Bayesian transition models for ordinal longitudinal outcomes,” a 2024 tutorial in Statistics in Medicine, and “Practical and statistical considerations for the long term follow-up of gene therapy trial participants,” a 2023 paper in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics resulting from his internship at Pfizer. He was honored as the graduate program’s Distinguished Teaching Assistant in 2022.