Announcing CANSSI Ontario’s 2021 cohort of Mdoc Program Trainees: Junhao Zhu

Junhao Zhu is a PhD student in the Department of Statistical Sciences (DoSS) at the University of Toronto (U of T). His advisors are Professors Dehan Kong (DoSS and Department of Mathematical & Computational Sciences, University of Toronto Mississauga) and Zhaolei Zhang (Departments of Molecular Genetics and of Computer Science at U of T).

Their Mdoc project, titled “Statistical methods on single cell sequencing (scRNA-seq) in tumor,” seeks to develop statistical methods to address specific problems that will be applicable in scRNA-seq analysis in the context of cancer, especially leukemia.

Junhao major was in applied statistics. He received his BA at the School of Mathematics at Sun-Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. He was an undergraduate research assistant of Southern China Center for Statistical Science working under the supervision of Professors Xueqin Wang and Wenliang Pan on hypothesis testing and statistical learning in metric spaces. A paper resulting from this work was submitted to Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B. He also helped organize the R-Conference Guangzhou 2018, a conference for statisticians and data analysts in China.

Currently, Junhao is interested in statistical inference for metric-space-valued data, high-dimensional statistical theory and Statistical methods on single cell sequencing (scRNA-seq).