Congratulations to PhD candidate Jiangmei (Ruby) Xiong, alumna Sarah Lotspeich (PhD 2021; now assistant professor at Wake Forest), former intern Joey B. Sherrill (now a software engineer at Lucid), assistant professor Gustavo Amorim, professor Bryan Shepherd, and associate professor Ran Tao on the publication of sleev: An R Package for Semiparametric Likelihood Estimation with Error in Variables in The Journal of Open Source Software on August 5. {sleev} addresses the need for a computationally efficient and user-friendly tool for obtaining sieve maximum likelihood estimators (SMLEs), which are used to analyze data in two-phase studies. The need for such tools is rising with the increasing use of routinely collected data, which is prone to measurement error.
Xiong is also first author of the 2024 Bioinformatics paper that introduced the R package {GammaGateR} for improving the replicability of marker gating results. A graduate of The Australian National University (BS, actuarial studies) and Columbia University (MS, statistics), Xiong co-authored three peer-reviewed papers published in 2024, in Nature, Artificial Intelligence in Health, and the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. At Vanderbilt, she was named Distinguished Teaching Assistant in 2023 and served as an officer of the Biostatistics Graduate Student Association from 2022 to 2025, first as treasurer, then vice president, and finally as president. In the wider statistical community, she is on ENAR’s Council of Emerging and New Statisticians (CENS) and an experienced volunteer for conferences such as SMI 2022 and ICSA 2024, as well as an organizer and presenter at ENAR, JSM, and more.
