Meet Our New PhD Students!

We’ll be featuring mini-profiles of our new PhD students over the next few weeks. We look forward to welcoming them into our community!

Hannah Jin

Hi, my name is Hannah Jin, and I was born and raised in the Greater Philadelphia area. I just finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). There, I was a Math major and Neuroscience minor.

As an undergraduate, I applied statistics to evaluate how social and environmental factors relate to clinical outcomes in frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), a neurodegenerative disease.

At the Penn FTD Center, I performed statistical analysis to explore how occupation, job-related environmental exposures, and genetics relate to cognitive reserve, disease progression, and survival in patients with FTD. Additionally, I applied statistics to study racial disparities in clinical presentation among individuals diagnosed with FTD, with the hope that this research will promote health equity by sparking further investigation into the social determinants underlying these disparities. I hope to continue contributing to public health through researching social and environmental determinants of health.

I also did causal inference research at the Penn Statistics and Data Science department in my junior and senior years. In one project, I researched how various types of childhood sports participation affect cognitive and emotional health in adolescents. In a methodological project, I worked on developing a novel statistical test for assessing whether covariate balance among matched quadruples has been achieved, which allows for a matched quadruple design for studying interaction effects.

I hope to contribute to biostatistical methods and public health research in causal inference, environmental health, and neurology at HSPH. Additionally, I am excited to explore other subfields of biostatistics.

Outside of school and research, I have been singing in choirs and a cappella groups for the past fourteen years, so I would love to join a choir at Harvard. I like painting and drawing, so I am excited to wander around art museums in the Boston area. I also like exercising, dancing, and singing karaoke. I am very excited to meet everyone!

Ethan Lee

Hi, my name is Ethan Lee. I’m from the Philadelphia area, but went to boarding school in New England, so I am excited to be back. I graduated from NYU in 2024 with a major in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science.

My experience with health sciences began in high school, when I spent two summers working at a microbiology lab at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. During my undergrad, I collaborated closely with a group from the Department of Population Health at NYU medical school. We primarily focused on the topic of domain generalization/domain adaptation, which arises during a prediction task when the training set is not an unbiased sample, that is it may only include data from certain prevalent domains in a population. I felt that this issue itself is highly relevant in today’s society, where minority groups are often underrepresented during sampling.

Our approach utilized a selection-guided approach, meaning we leveraged the fact each individual’s domain selection probability depended on their individual covariates. We eventually expanded this approach to more general contexts, including a semi- supervised approach which utilized unlabeled training data.

During my PhD studies at Harvard, I am keen on exploring more of the potential methods to analyze large datasets, such as EHR. Moreover, I am also interested in the aspects of developing statistics/machine learning methods, such as reinforcement learning, to analyze complex, high-dimensional data collected from mobile and wearable devices.

In my free time, I enjoy baseball statistics and am interested in utilizing statistical methods for areas such as in-season prediction and player evaluation metrics. I also enjoy tennis and squash.