My dissertation research, advised by Dr. Limin Peng, aims to improve the understanding of heterogeneity in chronic disease population. We devote to developing latent class analysis methods for complex clinical data with multiple folds of challenges, including latent class uncertainty, missing failure types of competing risks, informative cluster size of longitudinal markers, model selection, and computational issues. Our work is applied to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) research led by our collaborators from Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Emory University.

As graduate research assistant, I worked with Dr. Tianwei Yu on batch effect adjustment for RNA-seq data from fall 2016 to spring 2020. Our approach realizes batch effect correction in two steps, first in distance matrix level, then in count matrix level. R packages that implement our methods are available on GitHub (QuantNorm, scBatch).

I have also conducted collaborative research in several teams, including Winship Cancer Institute’s Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Shared Resource (BBISR), Biostatistics Collaborative Core (BCC) at my own department, and a multi-institutional team between Tongji, Ocean Univ of China, MSKCC and Emory.

I am enjoying my PhD life with strong curiosity being satisfied.

ORCID: 0000-0001-7888-1715

Publications:

• Methodological works:
  1. Fei T, Hanfelt J, Peng L# (202x) Latent Class Analysis with Proportional Hazards Submodel for Time-to-event Data. (Under preparation)
  2. Fei T, Hanfelt J, Peng L# (202x) A Time-Dependent Structural Model Between Latent Classes and Competing Risks Outcomes. (Submitted, an earlier version won ENAR 2020 and 2020 ASA lifetime data science section student paper awards)
  3. Hart K*, Fei T*, Hanfelt J# (2020) Scalable and Robust Latent Trajectory Class Analysis Using Artificial Likelihood. Biometrics, Accepted Author Manuscript. doi:10.1111/biom.13366. (GitHub, CRAN)
  4. Fei T, Yu T# (2020) scBatch: Batch Effect Correction of RNA-seq Data through Sample Distance Matrix Adjustment. Bioinformatics 36(10):3115-3123. (GitHub)
  5. Fei T, Zhang T, Shi W#, Yu T# (2018) Mitigating the adverse impact of batch effects in sample pattern detection. Bioinformatics 34(15):2634–2641. (GitHub, CRAN)
• # correspondence authors
• * co-first authors

• Collaborative works:
  
  1. Iskandar H#, Mujtaba S, Gardner D, Oppong P, Moore RH, Fei T, Lui D, Farraye F, Patzer R (202x) A Behavioral Intervention to Promote Medication Adherence in Inflammatory Bowel Disease – A Prospective Pilot Study. (Submitted)
  2. Bergquist SH#, Marcus M, Meng Q, Fei T, Robichaux C, Roberts D, Moore RH (2021) Association between business travel, health-related behaviors, and adiposity. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, publish ahead of print. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0000000000002278.
  3. Zhang T, Xu Y, Imai K, Fei T, Wang G, Dong B, Yu T, Satou Y, Shi W#, Bao Z# (2020) A single-cell analysis of the molecular lineage of chordate embryogenesis. Science Advances 6(45):eabc4773. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abc4773.
  4. Tian S, Switchenko J, Fei T, Press RH, Abugideiri M, Saba NF, Owonikoko TK, Chen AY, Beitler JJ, Curran WJ, Gillespie T, Higgins KA# (2020) Survival Advantage of Chemoradiotherapy in Anaplastic Thyroid Carcinoma: Propensity Score Matched Analysis with Multiple Subgroups. Head and Neck, 42: 678-687.
  5. Tian S, Switchenko J, Fei T, Press RH, Abugideiri M, Saba NF, Owonikoko TK, Chen AY, Beitler JJ, Curran WJ, Gillespie T, Higgins KA (2018) Survival Advantage to Combined Modality Therapy Seen in Multiple Subgroups Within Anaplastic Thyroid Carcinoma: A Propensity-Score Matched Analysis of the National Cancer Data Base. International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics, 102(3): e356-e357.
• # correspondence authors