Ana M. Ortega-Villa joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 2018 and serves as a mathematical statistician. Prior to joining the NIAID, Dr. Ortega-Villa obtained her Ph.D. in Statistics from Virginia Tech and completed post-doctoral fellowships at both the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Cancer Institute. Her interests include clinical trials, longitudinal data, mixed models, vaccines, immunology, research capacity building, statistics education, and initiatives that foster a culture of belonging.

Michael Proschan received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Florida State University in 1989. He has been a Mathematical Statistician in the Biostatistics Research Branch at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since January of 2006. Prior to coming to NIAID, he spent 16 years at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. He has co-authored three books: Statistical Monitoring of Clinical Trials: A Unified Approach, with Gordon Lan and Janet Wittes (Springer, 2006); Essentials of Probability Theory for Statisticians, with Pamela Shaw (CRC Press, 2016), and Statistical Thinking in Clinical Trials (CRC Press, 2022) and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Dr. Proschan is also an Adjunct Professor for the Advanced Academic Programs at Johns Hopkins University.

Megan Grieco graduated from the University of Virginia in 2021 with a BS in Systems and Information Engineering, and from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in 2024 with a MSPH in Biostatistics. Prior to starting in August 2024 as a master’s level biostatistician, she was also a part-time trainee during her graduate studies. Her projects focus on immunology in pediatric food allergies, as well as vaccine studies for influenza, malaria, and COVID-19. She particularly enjoys any project with a programming challenge!

Kevin Rubenstein has over 15 years of experience in statistics and medical research. Kevin joined the Office of Biostatistics Research at NIAID in 2021. He supports the design, monitoring, and data analyses for clinical research studies in a variety of infectious disease areas, including COVID-19, influenza, and mpox. Kevin completed his M.S. in Biostatistics at the University of Washington, and his B.S. in Biometry and Statistics at Cornell University.

Jing Wang has been a biostatistician with the Biostatistics Research Branch since late 2013. She holds an M.S. in Biology, with a concentration in immunology and molecular biology, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a second M.S. in Biostatistics from the George Washington University. Jing is passionate about statistical programming and exploring machine learning techniques.

Leslie McClure is Dean of the College for Public Health and Social Justice at Saint Louis University. Prior to joining the SLU community, she was Professor & Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Kansas, an MS in Preventive Medicine and Environmental Health from the University of Iowa, and her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan. Dr. McClure does work to try to understand health inequities, particularly racial and geographic, and the role that the environment plays in them. Her methodological expertise is in the design and analysis of multicenter trials, as well as issues of multiplicity in clinical trials. Dr. McClure is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Society for Clinical Trials, and of the American Heart Association and completed the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Fellowship. In addition to her research, Dr. McClure is passionate about increasing diversity in the math sciences, advocates for women and minorities in science, and devotes considerable time to mentoring younger scientists. When she is not working, Dr. McClure enjoys reading, spending time outdoors and with her family, and watching NCIS reruns.

Christina Mehta I am an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Emory University School of Medicine and have a secondary appointment in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Rollins School of Public Health. In my current faculty position, I am the Director of Biostatistics for the Atlanta site of the MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study as well as the co-Director of the Bioinformatics Resource Core of the Emory Specialized Center of Research Excellence on Sex Differences (SCORE), an Emory WIHS-linked research program. In this capacity, I provide biostatistical leadership and collaboration to all Emory investigators utilizing data from these large and complex studies. In addition, I am a member of the CFAR Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core. My role in these cores is to provide biostatistical leadership and collaboration in the areas of study design, development of data collection tools, assist with grant proposals, data analysis, interpretation and publication of results for investigators ranging in experience from student or trainee to established researcher. I am Director of Infectious Disease Biostatistics and teach and mentor students, trainees, and clinical researchers on conducting high-quality, rigorous biomedical and behavioral research.

Tanya Garcia Excited about innovating practical and theoretically sound methods that address challenges in biomedical fields, Dr. Garcia has built a strong interdisciplinary research agenda. It involves national and international collaborations with neuroscientists and biologists, high-impact learning opportunities for students, and service work that promotes a future of diverse (bio)statisticians. Her research focuses on extracting maximal information from large, highly correlated data structures and has led to scientific discoveries in neurodegenerative diseases and the gut microbiome. Her teaching integrates these research activities with interactive, learner-centered projects that promote critical thinking. Her leadership in service activities involves promoting the success of underrepresented groups in (bio)statistics and providing her professional expertise regionally and internationally. Her research innovates new statistical methods that solve important neuroscience and biomedical problems and advances the underlying theory of those methods. Her work has contributed to four exciting areas: prediction models, model selection for high-dimensional data, regression models with measurement error, mean-covariance modeling for longitudinal data.