About the Speakers

José Pinheiro is the Senior Director of Johnson & Johnson. He has a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, having worked at Bell Labs and Novartis Pharmaceuticals, prior to his current position as Vice-President and Global Head of Statistical Modeling & Methodology in the Statistics and Decision Sciences department at Janssen Research & Development. He has been involved in methodological development in various areas of statistics and drug development, including dose-finding, adaptive designs, and mixed-effects models. He is the current president of the International Biometric Society (IBS), a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, past-editor of Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research, and past-president of the East North American Region (ENAR) of the IBS.

Yenny Webb Vargas is a Principal Statistical Scientist at Genentech. She helps scientists and engineers design experiments, analyze data, and report findings about bioprocess, quantitative assays, medical devices, and bioanalytical methods. She has a PhD in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University, a Masters in Applied Statistics from the Tec de Monterrey, and a Bachelor in Science in Chemistry, Bacteriology and Parasitology from the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon.

Yu Du is a Director in Statistics and a Group Leader in diabetes and obesity therapeutic area providing statistical leadership to the chronic weight management compound development in the late phase at Eli Lilly and Company. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a PhD in Biostatistics. He has been passionate about developing new statistical methods for better clinical trial design and data analysis that impact drug development, including the research on prediction modeling, bias adjustment, covariate adjustment, etc.

Dr. Rebbecca Wilson is a Principal Statistician in Immunology currently working on late-phase IBD clinical trials. She joined Janssen in February 2020. She previously worked as a Lead Data Scientist at Fifth Third Bank. Rebbecca obtained her DrPH in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2018) and her A.B. in pre-medical studies and Spanish from Bowdoin College (2007). Prior to beginning her graduate studies, she completed a postbaccalaureate program in Mathematics and Statistics at Smith College. She also worked in Biostatistics at the Massachusetts General Hospital and taught English at a secondary school in Toledo, Spain. Rebbecca’s research interests include Longitudinal, Categorical, and Missing Data Analysis. Her dissertation research focused on imputation and repeated measures analysis for accelerometer data. She enjoys staying active, reading, and fishing in her free time.

About the Moderator

Christian Geneus, PhD is an R&D research scientist in the Data Modeling Sciences division of Procter and Gamble. In this role, he leads the development and evaluation of robust statistical models to drive decision-making and assess the safety of global consumer products. Christian obtained his BS in Physics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, his MS in Biomedical Sciences from Boston University, his MPH from St. Louis University, and both his MS and PhD in Statistics at Tulane University, where his research focused on modeling the early growth of disease epidemics. Christian is the co-founder of Black in Statistics, a non-profit designed to connect and inspire a new generation of Black statisticians.