Early Career Profile: Ron Yu
- Class Year: 1999
- Position: Biostatistician
- Company: Genentech
What he does:
Ron works as a clinical biostatistician for Genentech, which is a biotechnology research company based in South San Francisco. He is a member of the exploratory clinical development group. The current focus of his work is to ensure statistical integrity, adequacy and accuracy of early clinical trials involving a potent anti-tumor molecule.
Math on the job:
Biostatistics is the application of statistics to medicine. The most common type of statistical analyses that Ron carries out in his work is survival analysis, which is used to assess the treatment effect in a randomized controlled clinical trial. Other types of statistical analyses that he does at work include sample size calculations, group sequential clinical trial designs and so on. The majority of his work is done through statistical software such as S-Plus, R and SAS. He also writes implementations in S-Plus for the identification of prognostic biomarkers.
Ron's background:
Ron was a math and EE double major at WPI. After obtaining his B.S. degrees from WPI, he did his graduate work at Stanford. He received a doctoral degree in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics, and a master's degree in statistics. The title of his dissertation was "Regression Methods for Microarray Data". After that, he went to University of California at San Diego as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of chemistry and biochemistry. Recently he joined the department of biostatistics at Genentech.
Advice to students:
- "Gain some industry experience as early as possible. A good understanding of how a company operates is best learned through firsthand experience."
- "Get to know your professors well. Besides teaching you mathematics, they can provide you with invaluable advice on applying for graduate programs and choosing a career path. And they write your recommendation letters."
- "Solid mathematical and quantitative skills are still much sought-after qualities in a person that many companies look for. Extensive programming experience and good communication skills are big pluses too. Hone your skills while still in school."
- "Getting an in-depth exposure to another scientific field not only improves your understanding of how mathematics is viewed and used by another discipline, but it can also help your career tremendously in the long run."
- Take as many courses in mathematics, both pure and applied, as you can. As a math major, you have an opportunity to receive training in rigorous thinking at a level that is unparalleled in most other fields."
Last modified: January 23, 2007 08:19:30