Instructors

Diptavo Dutta, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Diptavo Dutta joined DCEG as an Earl Stadtman tenure-track investigator in the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch (ITEB) in July 2022. He earned his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. As part of his doctoral research, he developed methods to identify contributions of rare variants on multiple traits and the active genes within a gene-set associated to different traits. He earned an M.Stat. from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, specializing in biostatistics and data analysis, and a B.Sc. in statistics from the University of Calcutta, India. Prior to joining DCEG, Dr. Dutta was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Peter Kraft, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Peter Kraft joined DCEG as Director of the Trans-Divisional Research Program (TDRP) in April 2023. An internationally recognized leader in both biostatistics and the genetic epidemiology of cancer, Dr. Kraft oversees the DCEG Bioinformatics Virtual Core and supports Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) Principles for data management and sharing. He also provides strategic leadership to transdisciplinary research teams across the Division, helping identify and shape new research opportunities and the data platforms and tools that enable collaboration.

Prior to joining DCEG, Dr. Kraft was Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Director of the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and he served as the Faculty Director of the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core. He remains an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Mitchell Machiela, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Machiela received his M.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his Sc.D. in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His doctoral thesis focused on germline genetics and prostate cancer risk. Dr. Machiela joined the Laboratory of Translational Genomics as a postdoctoral fellow in 2012 and transitioned to the Laboratory of Genetic Susceptibility in 2015. In 2016, he was promoted to research fellow. Dr. Machiela was appointed to the position of Earl Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator in the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch in 2017.

Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Prokunina-Olsson received an M.Sc. in molecular genetics from Moscow State University, Russia, and a Ph.D. in medical genetics from Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2004. During 2005-2008, she was a visiting fellow with Dr. Francis Collins in the Genome Technology Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH. Dr. Prokunina-Olsson joined the Laboratory of Translational Genomics of DCEG as a research fellow in 2008, became a tenure-track investigator in 2010, and was awarded NIH scientific tenure and promoted to senior investigator in 2014. She became Acting Director of LTG in February 2018 and was appointed as Director of LTG in December of that year. Dr. Prokunina-Olsson has been recognized for her research contributions with an NCI Director’s Merit Award, several NCI Innovation Awards, Intramural Research Awards, and several awards outside the NIH. She has been recognized as an outstanding mentor by DCEG and the International Cytokine and Interferon Society.

Jayati Sharma, Ph.D., Sc.M.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Jayati Sharma joined DCEG as a postdoctoral fellow in the Trans-Divisional Research Program (TDRP) in September 2025. She earned a Master of Science degree in genetic epidemiology and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. During her doctoral training, she applied genetic risk prediction and causal inference approaches through integrative risk modeling in the All of Us Research Program and the Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study. As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Sharma works under the mentorship of Peter Kraft, Ph.D., and Rena Jones, Ph.D., M.S., to characterize the interplay of genomic and environmental factors in cancer risk and etiology in large populations.

Jianxin Shi, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Jianxin Shi is a senior investigator in the Biostatistics Branch of DCEG. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University in 2006, under the supervision of Professor David O. Siegmund. Prior to joining NCI, he spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow and one year as a research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, working on genome-wide association studies of breast cancer, schizophrenia, and depression. Dr. Shi joined the Biostatistics Branch as a tenure-track investigator in 2009 and was appointed senior investigator in 2016.

Dr. Shi is interested in both developing quantitative methods and leading substantive projects to advance knowledge about cancer genomics and its potential translational applications. His research focuses on three areas: cancer genetic epidemiology (identifying genetic variants associated with lung cancer, melanoma, and pancreatic cancer, and developing polygenic risk prediction models for risk stratification); cancer genomics (studying the landscape of lung cancer and chordoma and developing methods for analyzing driver genes, mutual exclusivity, and intratumoral heterogeneity); and microbiome epidemiology (investigating the role of the gut and oral microbiome in cancer etiology).

Wendy Wong, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Wong is an expert in international interdisciplinary research. She has in-depth knowledge of statistics, computer science, and biology. She has held numerous leadership positions working on algorithms for next-generation sequencing data at Illumina Ltd., in Cambridge, UK, and Inova Translational Medicine Institute. Prior to joining DCEG in 2022, she served as president and chief data scientist of Coherent Logic Limited, where she consulted on data analytics and helped organizations leverage the public cloud for genomics analysis.

Xueyao Wu, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Xueyao Wu, Ph.D., joined DCEG as a predoctoral fellow in the Trans-Divisional Research Program (TDRP) in December 2023 and advanced to a postdoctoral fellowship in September 2025. She employs GWAS, post-GWAS, cross-cancer, and cross-ancestry analyses to elucidate the contributions of genetic and nongenetic factors to cancer risk. Her work has centered primarily on breast cancer and, more recently, has expanded to other solid cancers and acute myeloid leukemia. She conducts her research under the mentorship of Peter Kraft, Ph.D., Director of TDRP.

Kai Yu, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Dr. Kai Yu is a senior investigator in the Biostatistics Branch of DCEG. He received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2000 and completed postdoctoral training in statistical genetics at Stanford University. He joined NCI in 2005 as a tenure-track investigator and was awarded scientific tenure by the NIH and appointed senior investigator in 2012. In 2009, he received an NIH Merit Award for developing creative statistical methods for genetic epidemiologic studies, and he is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Dr. Yu’s research addresses a wide variety of statistically and computationally challenging problems that arise in the design and analysis of modern high-dimensional genetic and molecular epidemiologic studies.

Haoyu Zhang, Ph.D.

DCEG, NCI

Haoyu Zhang, Ph.D., was appointed Earl Stadtman tenure-track investigator in the Biostatistics Branch (BB) in August 2022. He received his Ph.D. in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland in 2019, and his B.S. in statistics from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

Dr. Zhang’s Ph.D. dissertation focused on testing for genetic association and building risk prediction models for cancer incorporating tumor characteristics. He also led several analyses through multidisciplinary, international collaborations using the largest breast cancer genome-wide association study (GWAS) dataset from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC).

Weiyin Zhou, Msc

CGR, DCEG, NCI

Ms. Weiyin Zhou is a senior bioinformatics analyst in the Cancer Genome Research Lab (CGR). She earned her B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Chicago, and an M.Sc. degree in Statistics from Texas A&M University. She was selected as the recipient of the 2014 Margaret Sheather Memorial Award in Statistics. Her primary expertise centers around conducting mosaicism analysis. She specializes in handling somatic copy number alteration and germline copy number variation analysis across diverse data types such as SNP array data, WGS, WES, and targeted sequencing data. She designs and implements analysis pipelines to address these specifical tasks. Additionally, she has developed pipelines for 16S and ITS microbiome analysis. In addition to her current focus, she has previously been engaged in GWAS and SV analysis.