We are thrilled to celebrate the graduation of Ruby Jiangmei Xiong, whose distinguished career as a doctoral student at Vanderbilt officially came to a close last Saturday, December 13. Her dissertation, Statistically Guided Improvement of Medical Imaging Analysis, was supervised by associate professor Simon Vandekar with assistant professor Siyuan Ma, and it will become available at Vanderbilt's Institutional Repository in 2026.
With machine learning, data science, statistical methods/modeling in medical imaging, and health informatics among her specialties, Dr. Xiong won the department's Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award in 2023. She served our Biostatistics Graduate Student Association (an American Statistical Association chapter) as an officer from 2022 to 2025, first as treasurer, then vice president (and journal club organizer), and finally as president. She is in the second year of her term on ENAR's Council of Emerging and New Statisticians (CENS) and lead organizer for the CENS networking lunch at ENAR 2026.
Dr. Xiong's peer-reviewed publications to date include the following (asterisks denote other researchers affiliated with Vanderbilt Biostatistics):
Lee JJ, Xiong J, Phan TX, Reeder JE, Keener LC, Tholen MG, Vandekar S*, Zald DH, Darby RR. Impaired cooperation and prosocial learning during trust game in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. J Alzheimers Dis. 2025 Dec;108(4):1807-1818. doi: 10.1177/13872877251390493. Epub 2025 Nov 11. PMID: 41217840; PMCID: PMC12664923.
Xiong J, Lotspeich SC*, Sherrill JB, Amorim G*, Shepherd BE*, Tao R*. sleev: An R Package for Semiparametric Likelihood Estimation with Errors in Variables. Journal of Open Source Software. 2025;10(112):7320. doi: 10.21105/joss.07320.
Kang K*, Seidlitz J, Bethlehem RAI, Xiong J, Jones MT*, Mehta K, Keller AS, Tao R*, Randolph A, Larsen B, Tervo-Clemmens B, Feczko E, Dominguez OM, Nelson SM; Lifespan Brain Chart Consortium; Schildcrout J*, Fair DA, Satterthwaite TD, Alexander-Bloch A, Vandekar S*. Study design features increase replicability in brain-wide association studies. Nature. 2024 Dec;636(8043):719-727. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08260-9. Epub 2024 Nov 27. PMID: 39604734; PMCID: PMC11655360.
Hswen Y, Xiong J, Hurley M, Nguyen TT. Experiences of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia family caregivers on Reddit communities: A topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Artif Intell Health. 2024;1(3):127-135. doi: 10.36922/aih.3075. Epub 2024 Jul 30. PMID: 39246419; PMCID: PMC11378727.
Xiong J, Kaur H, Heiser CN, McKinley ET, Roland JT, Coffey RJ, Shrubsole MJ, Wrobel J, Ma S*, Lau KS, Vandekar S*. GammaGateR: Semi-automated marker gating for single-cell multiplexed imaging. Bioinformatics. 2024 Jun 3;40(6):btae356. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae356. PMID: 38833684; PMCID: PMC11193056.
Smith JR, Hopkins CE, Xiong J, Luccarelli J, Shultz E, Vandekar S*. Use of ECT in Autism Spectrum Disorder and/or Intellectual Disability: A Single Site Retrospective Analysis. J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Mar;54(3):963-982. doi: 10.1007/s10803-022-05868-6. Epub 2022 Dec 17. PMID: 36528758; PMCID: PMC10276173.
Xiong J, Hswen Y, Naslund JA. Digital Surveillance for Monitoring Environmental Health Threats: A Case Study Capturing Public Opinion from Twitter about the 2019 Chennai Water Crisis. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Jul 14;17(14):5077. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17145077. PMID: 32674441; PMCID: PMC7400361.
Dr. Xiong has also delivered invited talks at the National Cancer Institute, Emory University, and the Statistical Methods in Imaging Conference. We wish her the best and look forward to her future achievements!
Pictured: hex sticker for GammaGateR; Ruby Jiangmei Xiong (photo by Lisa Levoir; hex sticker for sleev