Dr. Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at UCLA. Her research concerns the role of genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors in the development of complex diseases, including cancers. It involves both methodological development in modeling biological data and hands-on data analysis. In her previous research, she has addressed some challenges of utilizing familial data in population genetics, genetic epidemiology and epigenetics studies. Her major concerns are how to appropriately model and take full advantage of the correlation structure of the large-scale genetic datasets and improve computational efficiency. She has built regularization models for combinatorial processes to improve the interpretability of large-scale genetic data from complex pedigrees in model organisms. Her current research focuses on building mathematical/statistical models and efficient user-friendly software to better utilize various types of high-throughput data (“big data”) and systematically understand the heterogeneity of complex diseases, to facilitate the evolution into the era of tailored therapy and personalized medicine.