Congratulations to associate professors Quanhu "Tiger" Sheng and Andrew Spieker on being selected for Vanderbilt University School of Medicine's Mid-Career Leadership Development Program (MCLDP). This year-long career development program is designed to cultivate and prepare Vanderbilt faculty for future success as medical center leaders.
As deputy technical director of Vanderbilt Technologies for Advanced Genomics Analysis and Research Design (VANGARD), a role he has filled since 2015, Dr. Sheng provides crucial supervision and training for personnel involved with large-scale initiatives such as the migration of VUMC’s BioVU repository (the world’s largest DNA biobank based at a single academic institution) to the cloud. His responsibilities include helping analytical staff and application developers to best assist users across a wide spectrum (from quantitatively untrained to highly experienced) and anticipate their needs, and representing the chair in multi-institutional working group meetings. He has been indispensable in VANGARD’s construction and maintenance of the genomics data pipeline that has fed into dozens of projects led by Vanderbilt PIs, and his expertise will become even more crucial as VUMC scales up its service to the Alliance for Genomic Discovery.
A well-regarded investigator who has made a name for himself in both statistical methods and collaborative biomedical research, Dr. Spieker is exceptionally passionate about providing top-notch teaching and mentoring. The graduate student body has named him Outstanding Faculty Mentor twice and bestowed on him its Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2021; he was inducted into the Academy for Excellence in Education earlier this year. He has also been vital to the success of Vanderbilt Biostatistics' graduate program as chair of the Comprehensive Exam Committee and member of its Executive Committee, and conducted dozens of evaluations during the past year as co-chair of the Faculty Search Committee and member of the planning and selection team for the Summer Internships for Underrepresented Undergraduates program. In the wider scientific community, he has served on the Regional Advisory Board of ENAR (Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society) and as Biometrics Section program chair for the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM)—the two highest-profile conferences in the biostatistics field. He was also recently elected book review editor of Biometrics, long regarded as one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the field.
Past MCLDP participants include Fei Ye, Qi Liu, and Ben French. On December 13, the 2024 cohort presented the novel strategic plans they had developed during their year of training to academic medical center stakeholders; these snapshots of 2024 participant Mario Davidson were taken by department chair Yu Shyr.
