Affiliation
Department of Biostatistics and Department of Statistics, Harvard University

Educational Background
University of Washington: PhD, Biostatistics (1994)
Tsinghua University, China: BS, Applied Mathematics (1989)

About Xihong
Xihong Lin is chair and Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of the department of biostatistics and coordinating director of the Program of Quantitative Genomics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also a professor of statistics at Harvard University.

Her research interests lie in development and application of statistical and computational methods for analysis of massive genetic and genomic, epidemiological, environmental, and medical data, as well as statistical learning methods. She works on whole genome sequencing association studies, genes and environment, integrative analysis of different types of data using causal mediation analysis, and analysis of electronic medical records.

Xihong received the 2002 Mortimer Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association, the 2006 COPSS Presidents’ Award, and the 2017 COPSS F.N. David Award. She is an elected Fellow of the ASA, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and International Statistical Institute. She also received the MERIT Award (R37) (2007–2015) and Outstanding Investigator Award (R35) (2015–2022) from the National Cancer Institute.

She is the contact PI of the Program Project (PO1) on Statistical Informatics in Cancer Research, Analysis Center of the Genome Sequencing Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and T32 training grant on interdisciplinary training in statistical genetics and computational biology. She is the multiple PI of the U19 grant on the Integrative Analysis of Lung Cancer Etiology and Risk from the National Cancer Institute.

Xihong grew up in Beijing, China. She studied applied mathematics as an undergraduate student at Tsinghua University. She became interested in statistics while working on her undergraduate thesis on analysis of time-series data. Under the direction of Norman Breslow, she earned her PhD in biostatistics from the University of Washington. Xihong started her career as a tenure-track assistant professor in the department of biostatistics at the University of Michigan in 1994 and was promoted to full professor in 2002. She moved to the department of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2005.

While at the University of Michigan, Xihong worked on statistical methods for complex longitudinal data such as mixed effects models, measurement error, and nonparametric and semiparametric regression or longitudinal data, and missing data. She began working on statistical and computational methods for massive genetic and genomic and health science data in 2008.

Xihong served as chair of the COPSS (2010–2012) and was a member of the Committee of Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the former chair of the new ASA Section on Statistical Genetics and Genomics, former coordinating editor of Biometrics, and founding co-editor of Statistics in Biosciences. Currently, she is the associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. She has served on a large number of committees of statistical societies, the National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation review panels.