Ms. Ruth Whitworth, Mr. Lixin (Simon) Gao and Dr. Lili Yu
Ruth Whitworth, IT and College Webmaster, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Georgia Southern University
Ms. Ruth Whitworth currently works at Georgia Southern University’s Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health as an academic professional. She is a liaison between the college and IT Services, as well as the college webmaster. She has an MPH in Biostatistics from Georgia Southern and an MBA from the University of Memphis. She has worked with Karl E. Peace on the Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium (BASS) as a webmaster/registrar since 2004 and has helped with the International Chinese Statistical Association server since 2007. Ruth enjoys working at the university, as it provides her an opportunity to help people and learn each day.
Simon Gao, Statistical Programming Consultant, Co-Founder, BioPier Inc.
Mr. Lixin (Simon) Gao is statistical programming consultant and co-founder of BioPier Inc. He is a permanent member of ICSA and currently serves as an IT director (2010-2012 and 2013-2015). Since 2006, he has contributed tremendous efforts to modernize ICSA information infrastructure. He established member database and server, enabled online membership registration/renewal and online payment. He also built electronic election as well as newsletters. Furthermore, he helped past five ICSA symposiums to accept online registrations and abstracts, also serving in their local or advisory committee as well.
Lixin Gao receives M.S. in Applied Statistics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In this career, he served statistical programming consultancy to many CROs and bio-pharmaceutical companies in the field of CSR, CDISC and eSubmission. He is a co-founder of BioPier Inc. where he developed Clinical Workbench, an online data review system for statistical reporting and patient profiles. He also created eSubmission toolkit for companies to submit clinical trial data to FDA.
Lixin Gao started his career as a software engineer in Xinhua News Agency back in 1990 after he received M.S in Theoretical Physics from Shandong University. Later he worked for Nortel Beijing office before came he to US in 1995. Lixin Gao also co-founded Hand-by-Hand Education Foundation (hbhef.org). Since 2006, HBHEF has sponsored over one thousand students in the poorest counties of China.
Lili Yu, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Georgia Southern University.
Dr. Lili Yu is associate professor in the department of Biostatistics in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health (JPHCOPH) at Georgia Southern University. She joined the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health as an assistant professor in 2007, right after she obtained her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the Ohio State University. At the same time, she serves as the faculty advisor of the office of ICSA, which is incubated in the JPHCOPH at Georgia Southern University. In addition to advising students on the office’s daily work, she communicates with different committees in ICSA and provides assistance for the local committees for each ICSA symposium as well. She has been a member in the ICSA Archive committee from 2008 to 2012, and serves as the chair of this committee in 2013. She has been a reviewer for Jiann-Ping Hsu pharmaceutical and Regulatory Sciences Student Paper Award in ICSA symposium for several years. She also serves in Student award committee in 2013 ICSA/ISBS symposium. Lili Yu’s area of research is mainly focused on survival analysis. She works on semiparametric linear models for heteroscedastic survival data in various aspects. Recently, she is also interested in logistic regressions for categorical data with missing values.