Dr. Cindy Chen is a Professor of Biostatistics, Biomedical Informatics, and Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and serves as Vice Chair for Education in the Department of Biostatistics. She also directs the department’s postgraduate studies, distance learning, and executive data science programs. Dr. Chen earned her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her methodological research highlights missing data, survival analysis, including treatment-switching and time-varying effects, Bayesian and penalized approaches, especially tailored for large-scale biomedical and electronic health record (EHR) datasets.
As a key contributor to the NIH All of Us Research Program, she develops statistical methods that integrate multimodal data from genetics, surveys, mobile devices, and EHRs to advance precision medicine in areas such as cancer, ophthalmology, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, and suicide prevention.