About
Niemi Consulting is headed by Jarad Niemi. Jarad is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University. His research focuses on time series models with application to synthetic and systems biology as well as disease surveillance and detection.
Current
As part of his work in biological applications, he is a member of the Integrated Cancer Biology Program and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. His advisor is Mike West and he collaborates with Lingchong You and Cheemeng Tan.
Although he has long been interested in epidemiology thanks to a fantastic class by James Rothenberger, his work in this area was initiated by a disease detection contest. The team, consisting of Jarad, Michael Porter, and Brian Reich, finished second in the contest. This sparked a collaboration with North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool, NCDetect, to develop a detection system that borrows strength across the counties in the state and thereby reduces the false positive rate of disease signals. He has also worked on building statistical models to detect reductions in drug abuse rates.
Previously
Prior to enrolling at Duke, Jarad received his Master’s Degree in biostatistics, worked as a junior scientist in a genetics lab, worked as a research engineer at Procter & Gamble, and earned his Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering.
Jarad earned his Master’s Degree in biostatistics at the University of Minnesota.
His master’s thesis examined contrarian strategies to winning final four office pools in conjunction with his advisor, Brad Carlin. As a student in the biostatistics department at the Univ. of Minnesota, he also performed analyses using the National Survey on Drug Use and Health as part of understanding the U.S. AIDS epidemic.
Jarad worked in the fruit fly genetics lab of Michael Simmons. This lab studies transposable elements, which are small segments of DNA that can jump around within the genome which cause mutations. In particular, the lab was interested in understanding the regulation process of these transposons which is believed to be due to microRNA.
While at Procter & Gamble, Jarad developed the formulation and process for a highly-fortified powdered beverage called NutriStar. As part of the formulation process, he researched consumers through focus groups and taste tests in the Philippines, India, and Venezuela.