Alumni Spotlight: Nathan Dyjack, ScM ’22
Nathan Dyjack, ScM ’22, is a healthcare data scientist at the University of Alabama Birmingham Medical Center.
Nathan Dyjack, ScM '22, is a healthcare data scientist at the University of Alabama Birmingham Medical Center.
Nathan currently oversees a mortality prediction dataset and inferential pipeline which identify patients with potential high health care costs. The project's goal is to estimate the one-year mortality probability for each patient using electronic medical record data.
His thesis, under the direction of Stephanie Hicks, PhD, MA, was titled Systematic Benchmark Evaluation of Distance Metrics for scRNA-seq Data.
Describe your current position and responsibilities in a way that will inform current and prospective students about career opportunities in your field.
Data scientist means something different at every organization. My job is to help leadership make data-driven decisions. Depending on the day, what I actually do can look more like an analyst, SQL developer, statistician, or ML engineer. A degree from Hopkins Biostatistics will equip you with theoretical, computational, and critical thinking skills to tackle all of these problems and more.
What sparked your interest in biostatistics?
I went to graduate school to study inferential techniques for single-cell genomics. The combination of technical limitations (sparsity) and analytical power continue to be a rich ground for developing mathematical solutions to real problems. In particular, I was interested in notions of observation (dis)similarity, and whether there could be a true best practice for this process.
What has been your most satisfying job experience using your biostatistics background?
Many people seem to shy away from statistics. It feels nice for people to approach me as the expert in the room: “We’ve got a statistician here who can tell us if what we’re doing is sensible.” And it feels even better to have the experience to say, “Yes, this makes sense, in fact we can formalize it and do even better like this.”
What led you to choose the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics?
Really, it was the people. While interviewing, no other school or department was as cordial and welcoming as Hopkins, including the faculty, staff, and students. My experience as a student was no different; everyone is invested in the success of others as much as themselves. I don’t think you could ask for a better environment to grow as a student.
I don’t think you could ask for a better environment to grow as a student.
How did your degree prepare you for your career? What aspects of the Hopkins Biostatistics program did you find most useful?
I found the more technical (advanced methods/theory) classes the most stimulating. I don’t use these skills daily, but they instilled a sense of confidence that others in the professional world pick up on. People come to me to sanity check their inference, and what seems like second nature to a biostatistics graduate is incredibly revealing for many other people.
What are your favorite memories of your time in the Johns Hopkins Biostatistics Department?
Hopkins Biostatistics has the absolute best environment of helping and teaching one another. I found the coursework generally (very) challenging, but everyone in my cohort was beyond willing to help one another (mostly me) make it to the finish line. This mentality extended to things like lab meetings, people approached new topics with curiosity and eagerness to share and learn. I found it invigorating to be around so many like-minded people.
My advisor, Stephanie Hicks, is truly the best. I have never felt more supported by a supervisor than with Dr. Hicks (and I feel that I have been very fortunate in the world of supervisors). Dr. Hicks being so great is just a microcosm of how much I enjoyed the people in the Biostatistics Department.
What was your favorite thing about living in Baltimore while you were a student?
I found Baltimore charming; it has a bit of a southern flavor for a mid-Atlantic city. I like that people often ask, “How are you doing?” when I pass them on the street. I loved eating blue crabs and trips to H-Mart in Ellicott City. A big part of the charm is all of the intelligent people in the Hopkins universe. It’s this giant network of smart and interesting people. I loved living in a row house with other students, our parties would almost always devolve into some big (but friendly) intellectual argument.