Lei Wang, MPhil, G4
Research Mentor: Danxia Yu, Ph.D.
ThesisTopic: Nutritional and Molecular Epidemiology
Biography
I received a bachelor degree in Preventive Medicine at Nanjing Medical University in 2017 and masters degree in Epidemiology and Health Statistics at Fudan University in 2020. Before joining Vanderbilt, I was working as a research assistant in JC School of Public Health at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My previous research focused on interventions on chronic diseases, especially for diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, to evaluate the effectiveness of lifestyle change on clinical outcomes. Now I will work with the research team led by Dr. Danxia Yu on multiple nutritional and molecular epidemiology projects to explore the association of gut microbial metabolites with risk of coronary heart disease and to identify the changes of gut microbiota after metabolic surgery.
Why Vanderbilt?
When I was a masters student, my mentor, Dr. Wanghong Xu, had a collaboration with the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center based on the Shanghai Women’s and Men’s Health Study and I was lucky enough to participate in it. As I know, the Division of Epidemiology at Vanderbilt University has lots of professors with diverse interests and expertise as well as collaborations with a broad array of institutions which can provide strong support and a rich resource for PhD training. Moreover, I was impressed by the friendliness of the professors and the two-way matching during the interview. I was paired with Dr. Danxia Yu upon enrollment into the PhD program which meant that I could do research related to my dissertation immediately and apply knowledge learned from courses to the real case. In the following years, I will try to become an independent investigator under the guidance of Dr. Danxia Yu.