Affiliation
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

Education
Postdoctoral Fellow, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
PhD, Biostatistics, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
MS, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
BA, Preventive Medicine, Fudan University

Ni Zhao was born in a small rural town in the middle of China, where she stayed until she went to college in Shanghai. Her career as a biostatistician arrived through a convoluted path. When she was a kid, Zhao’s parents wished her to become a medical doctor. She partly had the same wish (i.e., to work toward improving human health and well-being). Yet, she was also fascinated by the beauty of mathematics and didn’t think there would be a way to combine math and medicine.

In college at Fudan University, Zhao was enrolled in the preventive medicine program, which partially satisfied her desire to improve human health. Her undergraduate program provided essentially no mathematics training; however, mathematics came back to her through another route.

Zhao came to the US in 2007 and enrolled in the master’s program in environmental sciences and engineering at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All her lab mates worked toward understanding the liver toxicity of acetaminophen and industrial exposures using animal (e.g., mouse, rat, and rabbit) models. At that time, microarray was the ‘fancy’ high-throughput technology for measuring gene expressions, and plenty of data was generated through their experiments. Zhao’s first project involved analyzing the gene expression data generated from a recombinant inbred mouse strain. The extensive data analysis task reignited her passion for mathematics. She took a number of mathematics classes at UNC and later applied for the PhD program in biostatistics.

The years Zhao spent earning her PhD were filled with both struggle and fulfillment. As a student from a non-math major, she worked extra hours to catch up with everything she needed. The new projects and knowledge she learned excited her deeply. Along the journey, she met amazing people, including friends and fellow students who shared the same joy and struggle she had and mentors and teachers who provided insightful advice.

Currently, Zhao’s research focuses on statistical methodologies for genetics and genomics. Since her postdoc, she is particularly interested in understanding how the human microbiome (i.e., the bacteria that co-exist with human beings) contributes to our health and diseases using high-throughput sequencing technologies. She is also interested in how our immune systems recognize external or internal antigens through the sequencing of T-cell receptors and B-cell receptors.

Zhao is proud to collaborate with top-notch researchers as an assistant professor of biostatics at The Johns Hopkins University, participate in frontline research, and contribute her talents to improved health. She is happy she could finally combine her two childhood interests. She also loves teaching and nurturing next-generation statisticians and data scientists.