Statisticians & Scientists

Matthew Blake, BA

Matthew Blake, BA

Bioinformaticist

My name is Matthew Blake and I was born and raised around Seattle, WA. I graduated with my Bachelors degree in Biology, and soon I will complete my master's degree in Data Science with the hope of continuing a long-term career in bioinformatics. My hobbies include museum hopping, hiking, volunteering, reading, and cooking. I look forward to working and growing alongside my colleagues at WashU and The DRIVES Project.
David Brown, PhD

David Brown, PhD

Research Statistician II

Dr. David C. Brown is a Research Statistician in the DRIVES Lab. He completed his B.S. in Biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and earned his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research focused on understanding and predicting the inheritance of polygenic traits, like multidrug-resistant bacterial phenotypes, through the application of phylogenetic and statistical techniques to whole genome sequence (WGS) data. Dr. Brown's interest lies in uncovering and predicting the complex factors that contribute to human disease.
Ling Chen, MD, PhD, MS

Ling Chen, MD, PhD, MS

Statistician

Dr. Ling Chen is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. Dr. Chen received a M.D. in medicine and a M.S. in medicine from Beijing Medical University (China), a MSPH in Biostatistics from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in Statistics from University of Missouri. She holds a secondary appointment as Assistant Professor of Medicine. Dr. Chen’s research interests include survival analysis, multiple imputation for missing data, longitudinal data analysis, clustered data analysis and sample size calculation. She has been actively involved in research related to physical therapy, occupational therapy, nursing and Ophthalmology.

Ashwin Sabapathy, PhD

Ashwin Sabapathy, PhD

Senior Scientist

Dr. Ashwin Sabapathy is a Senior Scientist at the DRIVES Lab. He earned his Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawaii in Manoa where his research focused on transportation behavior modeling and air pollution exposures to particulate matter and carbon monoxide. He was a Fulbright award recipient in 2013 to carry out research on total exposure assessment at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

He was involved in applied research for a decade, working on urban and corporate sustainability, and has published several articles in this area. Over the past ten years, he has worked in product development in the telematics sector, where he has led data science teams to build new products, services, and features by applying machine learning and deep learning techniques on high-frequency vehicle sensor data. He was also a Chevening CRISP Fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, in 2017.

Wenqing Zha, MPH

Wenqing Zha, MPH

Wenqing Zha graduated in May 2023 with her Master of Public Health with a specialization in Epidemiology/Biostatistics from the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently a statistical data analyst in the DRIVES Project. Her research interests lie in improving the health of older adults and promoting health equity. Prior to working with Dr. Babulal, Wenqing worked on the Education Equity and Quality in Afghanistan and Pakistan (EEQAP) project, Aging project, and the Child Resilience in Afghanistan Study (CRAS) as a part-time research assistant with Dr. Jean-Francois Trani.