Jin J. Zhou, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Arizona, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. Her research concerns the role of genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors in the development of complex diseases, including cancers. It involves both methodological development in modeling biological data and hands-on data analysis.

In her previous research, she has addressed some challenges of utilizing familial data in population genetics, genetic epidemiology and pigenetics studies. Her major concerns are how to appropriately model and take full advantage of the correlation structure of the large-scale genetic dataset and improve computation efficiency. She has built regularization models for combinatorial process to improve the interpretability of large-scale genetic data from complex pedigrees in model organisms.  Her current research focuses on building mathematical/statistical models and efficient user-friendly software to better utilize various types of high-throughput data (“big data”) and systematically understand the heterogeneity of complex diseases, therefore to facilitate the evolution into the era of tailored therapy and personalized medicine.

Dr. Zhou had been a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University, where she worked with Professor Nan Laird and collaborated closely with fellows at the Channing's Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital on the genetic epidemiology study for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in Biomathematics in 2010 from the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Zhou obtained B.S. and M.S. in Applied Mathematics from China.