Zee Lab

Welcome!

Our research group develops and applies modern statistical approaches for research in pediatric and adult kidney diseases. We are affiliated with both the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. We use statistical theory and simulation studies to advance methods in survival analysis, causal inference, and machine learning for observational and high-dimensional data analysis. We provide study design and data analysis support for clinical research projects in glomerular disease and chronic kidney disease, including topics in biomarker discovery, genotype-phenotype data integration, pathology imaging, comparative effectiveness, women's health, pediatric skeletal health, cardiovascular disease, surrogate endpoints, and patient-centered outcomes. We are committed to an inclusive and collaborative atmosphere spanning across diverse individual backgrounds, working environments, and disciplinary fields. 

News

2024

12/10/24: Jeremy Rubin accepts offer for a Clinical Assistant Professor of Biostatistics position at the University of Maryland, College Park. Congratulations Jeremy! 

11/12/24: Jarcy Zee receives a Penn Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics Community All-Stars Award! Congratulations Jarcy! 

9/30/24: Tran Bourgeois joins the Zee Lab as a Biostatistician research analyst!

8/9/24: Shalini Ramachandra's abstract titled "Variations in Creatinine Generation among Patients with Glomerular Disease" and Jarcy Zee's abstracts "Estimating Causal Effects of Glucocorticoid Use on Infection Rates in Glomerular Disease using a Novel Marginal Structural Proportion Rates Model" and "Non-invasive Diagnostic Strategies for Membranous Nephropathy in the NEPTUNE Study" were accepted for poster presentation at ASN Kidney Week!

6/26/24: Meghan Gerety joins the Zee Lab as an MS Biostatistics student!

6/17/24: Allison Chen joins the Zee Lab as an undergraduate summer intern!

6/3/24: Valerie Owusu-Hienno joins the Zee Lab as an undergraduate summer intern and Penn Summer Undergraduate Internship Program (SUIP) participant!

5/13/24: Dominique Belezi joins the Zee Lab as an undergraduate summer intern!

4/29/24: NEW manuscript accepted at Glomerular Diseases, titled "Evaluation of Biomarker-based GFR Estimating Equations in Glomerular Disease." Congratulations Antara et al.!

4/26/24: Jeremy Rubin was invited to attend the Preparing to Teach Statistics and Data Science workshop at Oregon State University. Congratulations Jeremy! 

4/25/24: Shalini Ramachandra successfully defended her MS thesis, titled "Variation in Creatinine Generation among Patients with Glomerular Disease." Congratulations Shalini! 

4/3/24: Jeremy Rubin's abstract titled "Analysis of Independent and Correlated Imaging Features using Scalar-on-matrix Regression" was accepted for oral presentation at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Portland, Oregon. Congratulations Jeremy!

3/12/24: Jeremy Rubin, Shalini Ramachandra, and Jarcy Zee all presented their work in two back-to-back contributed talk sessions at the ENAR 2024 Spring Meeting, a whole lab showing! 

3/7/24: Jeremy Rubin presented his work titled "Novel Variable Selection and Prediction Methods for Unbalanced Feature Matrices" at the Penn-CHOP Kidney Innovation Center Work-in-Progress Seminar!  

2023

11/4/23: Jeremy Rubin presented his work titled "Leveraging Machine Learning Methods and Novel Data Sources to Develop Race-Free Algorithms to Predict Deceased Donor Kidney Quality" at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week conference! 

8/10/23: Jeremy Rubin presented his work titled "Novel Scalar-on-matrix Regression for Unbalanced Feature Design Matrices" at the Joint Statistical Meetings! 

7/14/23: Shalini Ramachandra joins the Zee Lab as an MS Biostatistics student!

6/23/23: NEW manuscript accepted at Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series C, titled "A Novel Agreement Statistic Using Data on Uncertainty in Ratings."

5/17/23: Jeremy Rubin presented his work titled "Novel Scalar-on-matrix Regression for Unbalanced Feature Design Matrices" at the Statistical Methods in Imaging conference!  

4/12/23: Antara Mondal successfully defended her MS thesis, titled "Evaluation of Creatinine-based GFR Estimating Equations in Glomerular Diseases." Congratulations Antara!

1/12/23: NEW manuscript accepted at Kidney360, titled "Clinical Relevance of Computationally Derived Attributes of Peritubular Capillaries from Kidney Biopsies."

2022

12/20/22: NEW manuscript accepted at Glomerular Diseases, titled "Predictors of Patient-Reported Outcomes in Glomerular Disease." Congratulations Jeremy et al.!

8/12/22: Jeremy Rubin's abstract accepted for the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week conference. Congratulations Jeremy! 

7/5/22: Antara Mondal joins the Zee Lab as an MS Biostatistics student!

6/28/22: Our published manuscript, titled "Kidney Biopsy Features Most Predictive of Clinical Outcomes in the Spectrum of Minimal Change Disease and Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis," was recommended in Faculty Opinions as being of special significance in its field!

6/9/22: Jeremy Rubin was invited to present at a NEPTUNE Steering Committee Call for his abstract titled "Assessing the form of predictor-outcome association for machine learning models of Patient Reported Outcomes in Nephrotic Syndrome." Congratulations Jeremy!

5/6/22: Jeremy Rubin received the Penn Center for Teaching and Learning Teaching Certificate. Congratulations Jeremy!

5/2/22: Jeremy Rubin received his MS for his research project titled: "Ridge regression for functional form Identification of continuous Predictors of Patient-Reported Outcomes" under the guidance of Dr. Zee and Dr. Mariani. Congratulations Jeremy!

5/2/22: Jane Liu joins the Zee Lab as a Biostatistician Research Analyst! 

4/27/22: Jeremy Rubin received top Biostatistics talk at the DBEI & CCEB Research Day. Congratulations Jeremy!

4/14/22: Jeremy Rubin successfully defended his MS thesis, titled "Ridge regression for functional form Identification of continuous Predictors (RIP) of Patient-Reported Outcomes." Congratulations Jeremy! 

4/14/22: Jeremy Rubin received the Penn Center for Teaching and Learning Graduate Fellowship for Teaching Excellence for the 2022-2023 academic year. Congratulations Jeremy!

4/06/22: Jeremy Rubin was invited to be a flash talk presenter for the DBEI & CCEB Research Day for having a top ten submitted abstract. Congratulations Jeremy!

4/01/22: NEW manuscript accepted at Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, titled "Kidney Biopsy Features Most Predictive of Clinical Outcomes in the Spectrum of Minimal Change Disease and Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis."

3/29/22: Jeremy Rubin presented the work for his MS thesis, titled "Ridge regression for functional form Identification of continuous Predictors (RIP)" at the ENAR 2022 Spring Meeting.

3/17/22: Jeremy Rubin presented his pre-dissertation work titled "PCA Structured lasSO (PCASSO)" to the Penn Biostatistics division for his Works-in-Progress talk.

2021

9/24/21: Jeremy Rubin joins the Zee Lab as a PhD Biostatistics student!

7/8/21: Jeremy Rubin joins the Zee Lab as an MS Biostatistics student!