Prior to my appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, I held a postdoctoral fellow position at Michigan State University, where I was working on statistical issues associated with epidemiology of drug abuse and genetic susceptibility to human health conditions. My research focused on development of statistical methods for characterizing interactions between risk factors associated with transition to drug dependence and on statistical genetics approaches for finding heritable components of health-related human traits.
My initial training in applied mathematics was from Voronezh State University, Russia. I moved to the United States over 10 years ago to continue my education and since then completed a master's degree in mathematics and a doctorate in statistics. My statistical work has been generally related to functional data analysis, which uses curves to summarize information over continuously varying variables, such as time or distance.
The techniques for functional data analysis that I've been working are applicable to a wide variety of studies and types of data, including those found in epigenetic and drug abuse research.