Overview

The NISS New Researchers Network is excited to host a special virtual event focusing on internship opportunities for those starting their careers in statistical sciences! Our panel of industry experts will share their own experiences from internships, discuss their current careers as statisticians or data scientists, and highlight some of the exciting internship opportunities available within their companies. Learn firsthand about the skills and qualifications these professionals developed through internships and how those experiences helped shape their career paths. Whether you are actively seeking an internship or just beginning to explore future opportunities, this event is designed for you!

Speakers

Claire Kelling, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Carleton College

Yaohua Zhang, Associate Director at Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Mei Li, Senior Software Engineer at Meta

Moderator

Jeremey Seeman, Research Associate in the Data Governance and Privacy group, Urban Institute & Adjunct Professor, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), University of Michigan

About the Speakers

Claire Kelling is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She received her Dual PhD in Statistics and Social Data Analytics from Penn State. Claire participated in internships at the Social and Decision Analytics Lab, the RAND Corporation, and the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group during her time as a graduate student.

Dr. Yaohua Zhang is currently Associate Director at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. With more than 7 years in Vertex, Yaohua has increasing responsibilities from lead study statistician for pivotal Phase 3 studies, key member of submission team, to project lead statistician, leading biostatistics team supporting neurology pipeline development projects. His research interests include rare disease clinical trail designs, basket trials, adaptive designs, dose finding, real world evidence and recently the application of AI in clinical trials. Since 2023, he became an adjunct faculty in Boston University. Yaohua received his Ph.D. in Statistics from University of Connecticut.

Mei Li: Rooted in maths and actuarial science, Mei has an MS in Actuarial Science from the University of Iowa. Her first internship was as an actuary with Allianz Life, hired into a start-up risk hedging team as a derivative portfolio manager/software engineer in the same company. Learning programming on the job, she fell in love with building trading tool. In later of the 10 years life in risk hedging after joining AIG, she transitioned from trader to product manager. The experience in building products provided her the entry ticket to the tech industry. In 2021 she joined Meta, and now a PM on their family of apps business line. Along with developing her career in finance/tech, she also served as a professional photographer and owns her own business and team based in California.

About the Moderator

Jeremy Seeman is a Research Associate in the Data Governance and Privacy group at the Urban Institute, an adjunct professor at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Jeremy’s research focuses on technical and policy solutions for responsible data sharing, with an emphasis on deploying and governing privacy-enhancing technologies to responsibly expand access to sensitive public good data sources. His work has been featured in numerous interdisciplinary venues including statistics, computer science, law, philosophy, and policy. Jeremy’s work develops privacy-ehnacing data sharing solutions for numerous public good organizations, including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Before joining Urban, Seeman was a Michigan Data Science Fellow at the University of Michigan. He received his BS in physics and MS in statistics from the University of Chicago and his PhD in statistics from Penn State University, where he was a U.S. Census Bureau Dissertation Fellow. His research interests interests include data privacy, privacy-enhancing technologies, social science reproducibility and data governance.

About the NISS New Researchers Network

The National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) is a national organization that works on issues related to information and quantitative analysis. The goal of the NISS New Researchers Network is to create connections among undergraduate and graduate students from different academic institutions and early-career professionals within the NISS Affiliates Program. The NISS New Researchers Network fosters collaboration and support among early-career statisticians, graduate students and undergraduate students offering resources and opportunities for professional growth.