Vivian Zhang (MS, BIOST ’26) never expected biostatistics to change the course of her career. She had always planned to become a physician. But after her first round of medical school applications was unsuccessful, a radiation oncologist she worked with encouraged her to explore biostatistics, a field she had never even heard of.
What she expected to be a steppingstone became something much more. "Going into it, I thought it was very niche," she says. "But after learning it, I realized it wasn’t. It's so useful in everything."
A bioengineering undergraduate, Zhang assumed research meant working in a laboratory with cell cultures and pipettes. She quickly realized that wasn’t the right fit. At Pitt Public Health's Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, she discovered another side of research—one driven by collaboration, data and solving complex health problems.
The department’s faculty played a major role in that shift. “All the professors are so amazing,” Zhang says. You can feel they really love working with students and teaching.” She credits Haley Grant, PhD, and Rebecca Deek, PhD, both assistant professors in the department, with shaping the way she approaches statistics. Grant emphasized that statistical decisions have real-world consequences, while Deek taught her that there is rarely a single correct answer, only decisions that must be thoroughly justified.
”I wanted to learn things so that I could use them later," Zhang says.
That mindset earned Zhang a 4.0 GPA and led to Alzheimer’s disease research with Dana Tudorascu, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and biostatistics. Under Tudorascu's mentorship, she presented a poster at the International Human Amyloid Imaging Conference, where she found herself among neurologists, radiologists and other clinicians.
"I felt like a very small fish in a very big sea," she says. "But it was very eye-opening. It was the first time I was able to really see how my perspective can be integrated with other specialties."
Her research focused on harmonizing blood-based Alzheimer’s biomarkers collected across different laboratory platforms. Although technical, the work has an important goal: making data from different studies comparable so researchers can combine larger, more representative datasets and draw stronger conclusions.
This fall, Zhang will begin medical school at Baylor College of Medicine. Her time studying biostatistics has changed the physician she plans to become.
"It's completely redirected my future," she says. "I envision myself working as a physician who integrates research into my practice. I want to let what I learn in medical school inform research, and vice versa."
Among the many things Zhang gained during her time at Pitt was an appreciation for running. She is one of many runners to come out of Pitt's Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, where, she notes with amusement, one professor taught class the day after finishing a marathon. An avid tennis player, Zhang jokes that she was never a runner "unless there's a ball in front of me," but the department's running culture and a few persuasive classmates eventually won her over. Along with a master's degree and research experience, she'll leave Pitt with a new pastime and the classmates who introduced her to it.
-Rebecca D'Acunto