Dr. Zeny Feng received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Waterloo in 2005. From 2004-2006, Feng worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University. She joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph in 2006 where she is now an Associate Professor in Statistics and the Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Feng’s research centers around developing statistical and computational tools for analyzing diverse types of data and addressing issues arising from genetic and biological studies. She is also interested in modelling the spread of infectious disease, with emphasis on methodology development for improving the model fitting, efficiency, and addressing the issue of missing information in data. Key research themes include:
Statistical Genetics. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are often performed for identifying SNPs or genome regions that are responsible for or associated with the trait(s) or interest. However, extracting useful information from a massive amount of data can be very challenging. Feng aims to find genes responsible for complex traits using the genome-wide coverage of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). From thousands to millions of SNPs, her group screens out the noises and obtains a small subset that are significantly associated with the traits. She develops different methods for such analysis when the data are collected using different study designs (e.g., longitudinal, cross-sectional, single trait, multiple traits, family-based, and population-based) and from different target populations (e.g., human and animals). Specific projects include:
Bioinformatics. Feng is interested in using microbiome sequencing data, to study human microbiome composition and their association with human physiology. Specific projects include: