Hi, welcome to my professional homepage! I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Columbia University, New York. Prior to joining Columbia, I completed my PhD from the Department of Statistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My PhD advisor was Prof. Susan A. Murphy.

My primary research interest falls in the area of dynamic treatment regimes or adaptive treatment strategies in a longitudinal setting. Dynamic treatment regimes are decision rules about recommended treatments based on past treatment and time-varying patient characteristics. Once developed, they can be employed to enhance the clinical judgments used in practice. I work on developing methods of estimation for these decision rules and valid inference about them from longitudinal data. A related area of interest is reinforcement learning, a branch of machine learning, where an agent learns to choose optimal actions by interacting with the environment. This has striking similarity with the problem of estimating optimal dynamic treatment regimes. I work on modification of classical reinforcement learning algorithms for medical applications.

My another research interest is in the design of multicomponent intervention trials, often involving behavioral or delivery components. In particular, I work on the use of fractional factorial designs for such trials. I have been involved with the design and analysis of a smoking cessation trial for cancer prevention involving multicomponent behavioral interventions. Recently I got interested in the design of early phase (dose-finding) clinical trials.

Here is my curriculum vitae.