Three questions for Lizhong
What has your career looked like to date?
I studied statistics at the University of Melbourne from 2017 and completed a PhD in Statistics in 2022. After submitting my PhD thesis, I got a job as a researcher officer at the Professor Gordon Smyth Lab, in the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI).
What do you do in your current position?
In my job, I mainly work on the edgeR (Empirical Analysis of Digital Gene Expression Data in R) project. edgeR is an R package and is one of the most popular tools for analyzing sequence read count data from genomic sequencing technologies such as RNA-seq, ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq.
In addition, I work on a lot of related topics such as single-cell RNA-seq, cell hashing, and spatial transcriptomes with collaborators and develop statistical methods and tools.
How has your mathematics/statistics training been useful in your career?
Studying statistics at the University of Melbourne gave me an opportunity to make a shift from pure mathematics to applied statistics. The knowledge and skills I learnt during the PhD study provided me with the firm foundations to develop a career in academic research and helps me to adapt to the new research field of bioinformatics and biostatistics in medical biology.
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