Internships

Biostatistics - Biomedical Data Science

The Division of Biostatistics in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, Tennessee invites applications for paid internships in Biomedical Data Science. Applications for summer 2024 will be reviewed starting October 16th, 2023 and will continue until positions are filled. We expect to have at least two positions for summer 2024.

Interns will work with one or more of our faculty members on a statistical project of mutual interest. The work is expected to lead to a tangible research product such as software package or methodological paper. Interested individuals must have strong programming skills in at least one language (eg. R, Python, Julia, C/C++, SAS), possess basic data analysis skills, and have a willingness to learn biomedical science. Applicants should possess a relevant (eg. statistics, mathematics, computer science) bachelor’s or master’s degree; undergraduate students must be rising juniors or seniors.

Most internships are 20-40 hours per week for 10 weeks, but total hours are negotiable. Internships may be paid or for credit at the student's home institution depending on institutional policies, student and faculty mentor preference.

Please send a cover letter with a resume/cv to biostatintern24@uthsc.edu. In your cover letter please explain your training goals, research interests, statistical training, and computer programming experience. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. 

Since 2016, the division has hosted 16 interns. The most recent interns are below, or click here for our Internship Alumni page.

Internship Alumni Page

Year	Name	Affiliation/Mentors	Project
2023	Galvin Li	MS Statistics, University of Virginia; mentors Chi-Yang Chiu and Feng Liu-Smith	NHANES data analysis to investigate the association of sex hormones with skin cancers. Galvin built multiple logistic regression to determine the association of E2, T and T/E2 levels with melanoma risk, adjusting to other relevant variables and examining potential gender-based differences. A similar analysis was performed using non-melanoma skin cancer as the outcome.
2023	Harper Kolehmainen	BS, Rhodes College; mentors Gregory Farage and Saunak Sen	Interactive Interface for Genome Scans using Pluto.jl and BulkLMM.jl packages. Harper created an interface for the  Pluto.jl and BulkLMM.jl packages in Julia. Additional improvements  included documentation and methodological improvisations as well as interface/API changes.
2023	Miyeon Yeon	PhD Candidate Biostatistics, Florida State University; mentor Hyo Young Choi	Assessment of mRNA degradation in FFPE tissue. Miyeon examined the RNA-seq data paired in FFPE and fresh frozen primary tumor tissue obtained from a subset of TCGAshe performed genome-wide comparisons of gene expression profiles between FFPE tissue and fresh frozen tissue using unsupervised/supervised clustering methods. The project looked at gene-specific as well as sample-specific degradation using SCISSOR and identified severely degraded samples in both cohorts looking for association with multiple factors such as total gene length, 3’ UTR length, GC concentration, etc. All analyses were performed in R/R Markdown.
2023	Siling Liu	MSc Computational Science and Engineering, Rice University; mentor Qi Zhao.	This internship focused on analyzing data from the CANDLE project entitled “Placental Epigenome-Wide Association Study of Early Childhood Body Mass Index Growth Trajectories and Overweight/Obesity Risk”.

 

About Memphis

Memphis is a mid-sized city with a distinctive cultural identity, mild climate, and affordable cost of living. It is the home of blues music, Elvis Presley, and barbecue. It offers the amenities of city life (zoo, museums, concerts, parks, restaurants) in a laid-back environment. The UTHSC campus is about 5 minutes from downtown and the popular Midtown neighborhood; there are many affordable apartments nearby. Most desirable residential neighborhoods within the city and suburbs are less than 40 minutes away.