iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Where has AI earned a place in your work, and where have you decided it shouldn’t go? In a recent lab meeting, my students and I got stuck on this question. The more we use AI, the harder it gets to articulate when it’s helping us - and when it isn’t.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Her paper was recently published in Statistics in Medicine and is also available on arXiv. Congratulations to Hillary, who recently started a position in the Department of Data Sciences at DFCI! rats to Hillary, who recently started a position in the Department of Data Sciences at the DFCI.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Her approach offers an efficient and scalable way to model survival times in the presence of many potential predictors, automatically selecting important variables and identifying whether their effects are fixed or random—without requiring prior knowledge.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

To address this, former Department of Biostatistics at UNC-Chapel Hill student Hillary Heiling developed an approximation to the popular Cox model for survival data. This approximation allowed her to adapt tools from prior work on modeling correlated binary and count outcomes to the survival setting

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

However, it is not known in advance which variables' effects vary across sites, which are fixed, or which variables are even associated with survival at all. Existing random effects models for survival data are also not scalable beyond a handful of predictors to answer these questions.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Random effects models help account for this variability across sites, enabling more accurate assessment of whether a treatment truly affects survival, rather than confounding results with site-level differences. This leads to more reliable and generalizable conclusions.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

In biomedical research, data are often collected across multiple hospitals or sites. These groups may differ in ways can that influence the relationship between a treatment and patient outcomes—such as survival time.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

New paper on fixed and random effects variable selection in mixed survival models with Hillary Heiling, Quefeng Li, Jen Jen Yeh, Joseph Ibrahim, and Xianlu Laura Peng, to appear in Statistics in Medicine: link: lnkd.in/eZsnBQZi Arxiv link: lnkd.in/esg3QYEx R package: lnkd.in/eGqETr6m

lnkd.in

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

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Matt Kmiecik @mattkmiecik.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

11 years ago, I thought R was unnecessary. Now, I can’t imagine life without it. The switch wasn’t easy, but it made me a better scientist. You can read my journey here: mattkmiecik.substack.com/p/my-start-w... #rstats #DataScience #OpenScience

mattkmiecik.substack.com

My start with R

The programming language that made me a better scientist

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Michael Love @mikelove.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Sayan was an amazing scholar and so kind. That's what I remember from starting off here in biostats, was how supportive he was and eager to chat about math and biology whenever I saw him at Duke. He trained many of my peers. I will miss him greatly.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

Yusha is an assistant professor in the Bios dept at @uncpublichealth.bsky.social and the @unclineberger.bsky.social, where she serves as a member of the Biostatistics Core. She recently joined our department and we are so lucky to have her! sph.unc.edu/adv_profile/...

sph.unc.edu

Yusha Liu, PhD - UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health

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Alejandro Montenegro @aemonten.bsky.social · 23/10/2024

"State your facts as simply as possible, even boldly. No one wants flowers of eloquence or literary ornaments in a research article" - R. B. McKerrow

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Michael Love @mikelove.bsky.social · 17/06/2024

Celebrating with Naim Rashid on his promotion with tenure (and birthday) @naimurashid.bsky.social It's been amazing to have Naim as a colleague at Dana Farber and then starting our labs at UNC Biostatistics over the past 8 (!) years 🙌

Joe Ibrahim, Naim Rashid, me, Didong Li, and Huitong Shi at Naim's tenure party

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Tim Triche, Jr.🔰 @timtriche.bsky.social · 26/04/2024

Semi-supervised analysis is almost always what people really want, especially when they aren’t playacting for study section or tenure Unsupervised: we don’t know anything about it Supervised: we know everything about it Neither is common in serious research. Thanks for fighting the good fight!

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Michael Love @mikelove.bsky.social · 25/04/2024

Congrats to @naimurashid.bsky.social on being honored with the Grizzle award and giving an amazing lecture on improving replicability of expression signatures for prostate cancer. So well deserved! 🎉

Naim Rashid standing at a lecturn at UNC Chapel Hill

Michael Hudgens handing Naim the Grizzle award

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 22/03/2024

Chief in Editor? MEGA journal?? Clinics in Oncology, which is also trademarked??? Best spam email I have received today Dear Clinics in Oncology™️ Chief in Editor, I am submitting something as we speak

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 19/03/2024

It’s not enough to just publish markers or signatures, but also provide a robust and feasible means to measure such markers on the a clinic, as well as clearly delineate the clinical properties of such markers, such as thresholds, their treatment implications, and their generalizability

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 19/03/2024

“All models are wrong and yours are useless: making clinical prediction models impactful for patients” nature.com/articles/s4169… A lot of great points here! You may have heard a few of these from me over the past few years, particularly about using multiomics for clinical prediction

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Michael Love @mikelove.bsky.social · 25/12/2023

Work from Noor Pratap Singh and Rob @robp.bsky.social on using transcript trees for DE for power and parsimony. Really excited about these applications going forward! Also including Euphy @fennecpaaaw.bsky.social and Jason Fan

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Wancen Mu @wancenmu.bsky.social · 12/12/2023

Thrilled to witness our work reach publication! Many thanks to @naimurashid.bsky.social for the invaluable guidance!

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 12/12/2023

Excited to share our recent work profiling clinically-relevant mutations in CRC patients receiving SOC therapies in CALGB 80405, highlighted in @JCO_ASCO. Kudos to UNC Bios student Wancen Mu for her critical contributions to this work! Paper: tinyurl.com/yhsvntkj Editorial: tinyurl.com/2554u4yx

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 24/11/2023

Happy thanksgiving from…@PeppaPigFlorida! Any yes, there is an entire theme park devoted to @peppapig, and yes, we did actually go there My idea of roast pig for dinner tonight was flatly rejected

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 07/11/2023

Pedro was a standout student, winning multiple awards while in our department. He also strong skills in statistical computing, consulting, software development, and genomics. Any department would be lucky to have him

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

Arxiv link is here: arxiv.org/abs/2207.08911

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

Our work developing formal methods to handle (non)ignorable missing data in supervised #deeplearning is now online at JCGS! Great work by former @uncbiostat student David Lim, now @GSK. Was not an easy problem to tackle but David did a great job! link: shorturl.at/dflrV

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 07/10/2023

Need to get that steak-umms guy on here too. Steak-umms bless

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

And also I don’t think the olive garden account hasn’t gotten invited yet 😂

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

I’ve been doing side by side testing the last two weeks and Bluesky has been crickets most of the time

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

Thank you Ben! It's been amazing to see you and your group grow into what it is today!

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

That you Jeremy! That means a lot! Say hi to Hillary Heiling for me at DFCI!

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 05/10/2023

Excited to share the news of my appointment to associate prof with tenure @uncbiostat! Milestones like this don’t happen alone, and are made possible by amazing mentors, colleagues, collaborators, students, and especially family Thank you for everything, and for believing in me

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Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 30/09/2023

We have a cool new tool (in rust!) for bulk sequencing-based quantification brewing (github.com/COMBINE-lab/...). It should work well for RNA-seq quantification, metagenomic abundance estimation & related problems. Will put up quickstart guide soon for those interested in testing. Feedback welcome!

github.com

GitHub - COMBINE-lab/piscem-infer

Contribute to COMBINE-lab/piscem-infer development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 02/10/2023

Thanks! I was definitely not brave enough to try when I was finishing up!

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 30/09/2023

Post-#AACRPan23, a trip to @MikesPastry is a must for the fam back home Still trying to figure out how the lines work, 10 years later

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 30/09/2023

Side benefit of being at #AACRPan23 in Boston: getting to celebrate stellar @uncbiostat @UNCpublichealth student Hillary Heiling's successful doctoral defense! Best of luck @dfcidatascience, they are lucky to have you!

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 29/09/2023

Yes I can imagine that! You make a great point, will need to look into how best to control this in my final version. Worst case I can mess with the latex output as you said

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 29/09/2023

#rstats folks: any experiences with writing grants in Rmarkdown/quarto? So far its been way smoother than writing in latex, and I am hoping that citations/bibliography management will be much more straightforward than Word (endnote...) Any tips/pitfalls to watch out for?

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Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

I'm excited to announce that the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Biology has TWO openings for tenure track Assistant Professors using genomics-informed methods to study critical questions in Plant and/or Microbial Biology. unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/265...

unc.peopleadmin.com

Assistant Professor

The Department of Biology at UNC Chapel Hill (https://bio.unc.edu/) is searching for two tenure track Assistant Professors using genomics-informed methods to study critical questions in Plant and Micr...

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Naim Rashid @naimurashid.bsky.social · 25/09/2023

A friend was at an early career researcher workshop on grant writing and heard tapping from the window. She turned to see a large vulture staring at her, later joined by three more vultures, each tapping their beaks on the window. Can anyone think of symbolism more demoralizing??

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