Shu-Hsien Cho
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, advised by Dr. Chad D. Huff. I expect to graduate in May 2027.
I develop statistical methods that turn large-scale sequencing data into interpretable genetic evidence. My dissertation focuses on rare-variant association testing in biobanks: using continuous functional annotations to form variant sets adaptively and to estimate effects by annotation stratum (VACANT), accounting for genetic relatedness and population structure (VACANT-M), and calibrating continuous coding-variant scores across variant types (SHARC). I also develop causal inference methods for time-to-event outcomes, including mediation analysis under the Cox model. See Research and Publications, or my CV.
News
- Oct 2026: Poster at the ASHG 2026 Annual Meeting, Montréal. SHARC: improved LoF SNV and Indel severity prediction and cross-type recalibration of coding variant annotation scores for clinical classification.
- Oct 2026: Platform talk at the IGES 2026 Annual Meeting, Estérel, Québec. VACANT: A Tool for Annotation-Stratified Rare Variant Association Analysis and Effect Size Estimation.
- Dec 2025: Poster at the Joint Meetings of the 2025 Taipei International Statistical Symposium and the 13th ICSA International Conference, Taipei. VACANT: An Adaptive Framework for Rare-Variant Association Testing that Leverages Continuous Functional Annotations.
- Oct 2025: Poster at the ASHG 2025 Annual Meeting, Boston. Annotation-based dynamic variant sets boost univariate and multivariate rare-variant association discovery in biobank cohorts.
- Oct 2025: Received the GSBS/MDACC Student Travel Award and the GSBS Quantitative Sciences Program Travel Award for the Joint Meetings of the 2025 Taipei International Statistical Symposium and the 13th ICSA International Conference.
- Sep 2025: Poster at the IGES 2025 Annual Meeting, Cologne. VACANT-M: An Annotation-Enhanced Variant-Set Association Test Accounting for Genetic Relatedness and Population Structure.
- Jul 2025: A large-scale genome-wide association study of stuttering, to which I contributed a secondary heterogeneity analysis, was published in Nature Genetics.
- Nov 2024: Poster at the ASHG 2024 Annual Meeting, Denver. VACANT: Variant Annotation Clustering AssociatioN Test.
- Oct 2024: Received the GSBS Quantitative Sciences Program Travel Award for the ASHG 2024 Annual Meeting.