YODA 2025 Mentees

JingJING GAO (LinkedIn)

Bio: Jingjing is currently a Director of Biostatistics at Alector. She is a biostatistician with 13+ years of experience in driving and leading clinical trial design and statistical analysis. Prior to Alector, she worked at Grail, Gilead, AbbVie, and Emory University. Jingjing received her PhD in Biostatistics from Emory University. Outside of work, she loves and enjoys traveling.

What motivates you to participate in the YODA program?

1. Personal and Professional Growth: One of the primary motivations is the opportunity for personal and professional development. Learning from someone with more experience and knowledge can provide invaluable insights and guidance.
2. Skill Enhancement: Being part of a mentorship program allows me to develop and refine specific skills. Whether it's technical skills, leadership abilities, or soft skills, a mentor can provide targeted advice and feedback to help me improve.
3. Career Advancement: The mentors can provide me guidance on career paths, offer me advice on making strategic decisions, and help me in navigating career transitions. This can be instrumental in achieving long-term career aspirations.
4. Learning from The Best: The mentor can bring a wealth of experience and knowledge. Learning from their successes (and mistakes) can provide me practical lessons that are not always available through formal education or training.

Topics of interests: Currently experiencing bottleneck in career at Director level, want to learn how to break the bottleneck and make it to the next level. Prefer mentor who is VP+ level with 20+ YOE, but open-minded to learning from any mentor as well. Want to learn both soft and hard skills needed to get to the next level, especially navigating organizational hierarchies + how to influence. Current experience has been 14+ years in biostats/clinical trials track (biostats PhD background), want to stay within clinical trials + pharma space. Also interested in becoming mentor after being in program for 1 year.

Yi Li (Linkedin)

Bio: I am currently an 1-yr intern under Data Strategy & Delivery of Genentech and holds a Master's degree in Biostatistics from Yale University. Outside of work, I serve as research assistant for Yale School of Medicine focusing on hospital readmission of Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome. Since 2022, I have developed genuine passion for data science in healthcare. And I am determined to develop my career path in biotech/pharma.

What motivates you to participate in the YODA program? I love BBSW! And I am excited to learn from inspiring leaders of BBSW

Topics of interests: explore career paths

Sudhir Kedare (LinkedIn)

Bio: Sudhir Kedare is an Associate Director of Data Science at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, with 15 years of experience in Statistical Programming and Analytics within the pharmaceutical industry. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science with focus in areas such as Data Mining, Data Analytics, and Design & Analysis of Algorithms.

In his current role, he oversees the work of Analytics teams across clinical trials in Oncology and Neuroscience. Sudhir is also a founding and core member of a subgroup dedicated to advancing Open-source and innovative approaches to data review, exploration, and visualization. Committed to collaboration in the fields of Analytics, Open-source, Machine Learning, and AI, he has actively contributed to the industry by attending and presenting at major conferences, including PHUSE, PharmaSUG, WUSS, and BBSW.

What motivates you to participate in the YODA program? As a YODA Mentee, Sudhir’s primary goal is to refine his leadership skills and gain insights into how to develop and implement strategies that drive the success of cross-functional teams, departments, and stakeholders, both in the short and long term. Ultimately, I aspire to lead one of the most innovative and forward-thinking teams in the industry, where I can cultivate growth, foster collaboration, and drive breakthrough advancements.

Topics of interests:

1. Developing effective strategies for building and leading high-performing teams within larger organizational structures, with a focus on fostering innovation and aligning with strategic business objectives, such as enhancing team synergy and driving collaborative success.

2. Exploring the integration of innovative approaches into daily workflows, such as the use of generative AI to enhance quality assurance processes and extract valuable insights from clinical study results and process documentation.

Jayant Solanki (Linkedin)

Bio: Computer science graduate. Initially a software engineer, switched to biotech 5 years back. Use R/Python/Shiny daily on Clinical Trials data. Trying to involve applied ML in Clinical trials in the area of data review, exploratory analysis and data pipelining.

What motivates you to participate in the YODA program? Lots of seniors there with experience, vision and past knowledge of BioTech data science.

Topics of interests: ML in biotech; R adoption in biotech; Work-Life balance suggestions

Jeni Zhou (LinkedIn)

Bio: I earned my master's and PhD in biostatistics from the University of Minnesota. During graduate school, I interned at Medtronic, Genentech, and Allergan. After graduating in 2019, I worked at Amgen and Gilead for 2 years each in the Inflammation therapeutic area. Since 2023, I've been with BeiGene's late solid tumor team, focusing on submissions.
I'm keen to explore statistical methods and gain trial experience.

What motivates you to participate in the YODA program?

1. I think the YODA program offers a fantastic chance to learn from experienced mentors in the industry. Their insights will be invaluable for me as a junior statistician.
2. A peer BBSW volunteer who attended the 2023 YODA program recommended it highly, saying it was an excellent experience.
3. Interacting with YODA mentors and following their advice would boost my confidence and prepare me for future career challenges.

Topics of interests: Currently in traditional biostatistics path and has interned and full-time worked in several pharma/medtech companies. Intend to stay in pharma. Previous career changes due to feelings of career lulls/lack of opportunity within company. Happy with current job and lots of growth in past year, and would like to continue to stay long-term within a company. Want to learn more about how to do so while maintaining pace of learning and growth, traditional career ladder vs. moving around, how to manage up, seek opportunities, and assess risks and benefits regarding major career decisions. Prefers mentor who is experienced in the biostats/clinical trials area (especially inflammatory/oncology diseases), and has also experienced many changes within career.

George Wu (Linkedin)

Bio: Passionate about improving drug development through strategy and innovation. Studied Bioengineering for Bachelors at UCSD and Biostatistics for PhD at JHSPH. Interested in innovative trial design and analysis, applications of AI in drug development, portfolio strategy and assessing likelihood of compound success. Recently, thinking a lot about potential to start a company based on a novel product or service, how to make better decisions in organizations, business strategy and leadership, and how to prioritize and add value through innovation.

What motivates you to participate in the YODA program? Think the program is awesome and would love to be paired with great mentor to learn from.

Topics of interests: Find a mentor as a role model in terms of career path and learn about areas to work on and improve; network building and mentoring relationship development; Curious to see the differences among the mentors; Explore ways to balance career expertise in classic statistician role, leadership, innovation, small company, start-up, etc.