XIN YAN, Ph.D.
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Welcome
Biostatistics is actually two fields of study combined. The bio part involves biology, the study of living subjects. The statistics part involves the designing, modeling, and interpreting data. Biostatistics has numerous real-word and scientific applications. It is commonly used in large-scale efforts, such as drug testing and environmental model-building. Given a set of data collected from biological experiments, scientists combine biostatistics and probability theory in order to determine the likelihood of diseases for given populations, to evaluate drugs to cure and prevent diseases, to assess drug safety and people’s reaction to the drugs. In addition, biostatistics is used in studying inheritance patterns of genes and traits in populations to identify potential risk factors for disease and seek ways of prevention. In recent years, biostatistics has been heavily involved in gene co-expression networks to explore the systemetic functionality of genes.
