What is Zane doing right now?

As of 2023-03-06, this is what I am working on.

My projects

  • I’ll be joining StateFarm as a data science intern over the summer! Wow!! So I’ll have a full time job and probably won’t get too much research done, but I’ll try my best.
  • I’m formatting and getting ready to submit a paper about differences between clinical and patient reports of influenza symptoms. Huge shout-out to the great undergrad students I got to work with on this one: Annika Cleven and Jackie Dworaczyk.
  • Writing my dissertation proposal, broadly on these areas.
    • How well did past vaccines confer immunity to future (at the time, they are past now) strains?
    • Is antigenic distance between vaccine strains and circulating strains important for determining how protective the vaccine will be? Fortunately, I’ve worked with a great colleague who previously did a lot of hard work on this.
    • What is the best way to quantify the “breadth” of a flu response? That is, if you get a vaccine, how can we measure the extent of which flu strains you’ll be protected against?
  • I’m still reading Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath. I’m currently working on the Chapter 6 exercises. You can see my progress here.
  • The norovirus challenge review (finding every norovirus challenge study that’s ever been conducted) is currently on hold for a bit, but I hope to come back to it after my proposal and stuff.

Collaborations

  • My colleague Yang Ge is now a professor (yay Yang!) and has submitted the norovirus Bayesian modeling paper I did some work on.
  • Making a lot of figures for a longitudinal analysis of influenza immune response trajectories. Most of the paper and analysis is being done by Meng-Hsuan Sung.

Not research stuff

  • I’m the TA for my adviser’s Modern Applied Data Analysis course. We’re having a lot of fun doing machine learning and that kind of stuff.
  • Currently trying to read, when I get a chance:
    • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
    • The Stand by Stephen King
    • Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way by Will Kurt