Hey, I'm Lathan

Medical Student | Data Scientist

I'm currently an M2 at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Although I have always intended to pursue medicine, I have an inexorable fascination with data science. This passion for data pulled me towards cardiovascular research at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, an MPhil in Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge, research at the Biostatistics Unit, and data science at Merck. Currently, I'm simultaneously researching genomic predictive models for coronary artery disease and calibration of machine learning models.

• CV

About

I'm a proud child of two Taiwanese immigrants and a first-generation college student. For high school, I attended Bergen County Academies in the Academy for Medical Science and Technology. I then moved across the country to Pomona College, where I studied Molecular Biology and Statistics. In my sophomore year, I was accepted to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as a FlexMed Scholar. Following graduation, acutely focused on honing my data skills, I decided to defer medical school and pursue an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in Epidemiology under the supervision of Dr. Stephen Kaptoge and Dr. Paul Pharaoh.After spending almost 2 years in the UK honing my statistics acumen and my programming skills, I decided to move into industry, propelled by the desire impact real-world decision-making. At Merck, I built bioinformatics tools to scale drug discovery efforts.Now a medical student, what occupies my head space is doing actionable research in cardiovascular genomics and predictive modeling. To unwind, I'm probably watching Netflix, playing real or fantasy basketball, upkeeping my Beli restaurant and cafe list, exploring NYC, or coding.

Contact

If you'd like to chat, please feel free to email me at liou.lathan[at]gmail[dot]com

Projects

What occupies my headspace most right now is how to generate actionable insights spanning genomics, machine learning models, and cardiovascular medicine. I also think a lot about productivity, team-building, and software.

Selected Research
• Liou L, Hornburg M, Robertson DS. Global FDR control across multiple RNAseq experiments. Bioinformatics. 2023• Liou L, (...), Mittleman MA. Racial disparities in post-transplant stroke and mortality following stroke in adult cardiac transplant recipients in the United States. Plos One. 2023• Salia S, (...), Liou L, (...), Mittleman MA. Post-transplant mortality and graft failure after induction immunosuppression among Black heart transplant recipients in the United States. American Journal of Transplantation. 2022• Liou L, (...), Phraoah PDP. Genomic risk prediction of coronary artery disease in women with breast cancer: a prospective cohort study. Breast Cancer Research. 2021• Liou L, Kaptoge S. Association of small, dense LDL-cholesterol concentration and lipoprotein particle characteristics with coronary heart disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Plos One. 2020Thought Pieces
• Liou L, Swaminathan A. How to enhance lab-team efficiency with tools from the tech industry. Nature. 2024• Liou L, Swaminathan A. How ‘retro’ meetings can enhance collaboration. Nature. 2023• This is what the ultimate R data analysis workflow looks like. Medium. 2021• How well do you “really” know survival analysis?. Medium. 2021• How to Make a Professional-looking Shiny App and Not Get Intimidated (With R). Medium. 2020• How to Start Learning Bioinformatics and Not Get Intimidated (With R). Medium. 2020Organizations
• MEDICS, an initiative that aspires to raise the minimum level of statistical literacy in all physicians and physicians-to-be
• Refresh Bolivia, a 501(c)3 that improves the public health of 10,000+ community members in Cochabamba, Bolivia
• MD+, a 501(c)3 that supports an international community of 3,000+ aspiring physician-innovatorsSoftware
• Shiny Trumpets, an app designed to help you visualize GWAS data via a trumpet plot
• Wrangle, an app designed to help you practice data wrangling in R and SQL
• onlineFDR, an R package that offers novel algorithms to control error rates in our modern era of research
• onlineFDR Explore, Shiny app for onlineFDR
• onlineFWER Explore, Shiny app extension for onlineFDR
• wrangle_purrr, Shiny App to teach the purrr package
• tidyde, a tidy framework for next generation sequencing differential expression analysis

Press coverage

• At ACC, Researchers Showcase New Approaches to Polygenic Risk Scores
• Genomic risk prediction of coronary artery disease in women with breast cancer: a prospective cohort study
• How NYC hospitals are using artificial intelligence to save lives
• Mount Sinai puts machine learning to work for quality and safety
• AI was supposed to save health care. What if it makes it more expensive?
• 5C Experience: 5C Students Build a Health Clinic in Bolivia