Body
Amy Zhou, PhD, grew up in a Chicago-area family where numbers and critical thinking skills were part of her everyday life. Her father was an engineer and her mother was a statistician who worked in the pharmaceutical industry. By the time she was a teenager, Zhou was so passionate about math and science that she was accepted at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), a three-year residential high school in suburban Aurora focused on “nurturing creative, ethical, scientific minds that advance the human condition.”
Zhou loved the residential campus and the friends she made at IMSA, including a boy who would later become her husband. When it came time for college, she chose Wellesley, a small women’s liberal arts college outside Boston, and decided to major in chemistry. She wasn’t sure what direction she wanted to go with her degree until she did a clinical research internship at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Chemistry can be a very solo pursuit, one person in a lab,” she notes. “But after my internship, I knew I would enjoy clinical research more. You get to interact more with people, whether it’s patients or clinicians.”
Zhou always planned to return to Chicago after college. She landed a job at Lurie Children’s Hospital in downtown Chicago and got involved in a multi-center study looking at the effects of early rehabilitation for children with traumatic brain injuries. But when the data collection phase was complete, the researchers discovered they hadn’t enrolled enough participants to answer all the questions they had initially posed. “The study was underpowered,” Zhou remembers. “That was what really got me interested in biostatistics. I realized we might have been able to adjust the study along the way. There were a lot of different things we could have done.”
She decided to get a master’s degree in biostatistics from Northwestern University while she was still working. She hoped that a master’s would be enough to transition to the field of biostatistics but several of her mentors urged her to go further and get a PhD. She was accepted to Harvard University’s program in 2019 and headed back to the Boston area while her fiancé was working in Chicago. She finished her doctorate in 2024 and was looking for positions when she spotted a posting for a biostatistician at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. “I didn’t expect to hear back from them. I know these things move quickly,” she says. “I was very pleasantly surprised when I heard back.”
Zhou started her new gig in January. She is the only biostatistician on staff at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and has already fielded more than 40 requests for her help. “Some of them are one-time meetings about ‘Is this the correct statistical method to use? How do I design a study that will generate data to answer my questions?’ Some projects are multi-year ongoing clinical studies. That makes the job really fun,” Zhou says.
She knows that statisticians in general, and biostatisticians in particular, are in high demand these days and she has a variety of career options. However, she always wanted to return to clinical research. “I’m passionate about improving general health outcomes,” she says. “I want to do something that has a positive impact on society at the end of the day.”
Her supervisor, Allen Heinemann, PhD, director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, is glad she made that choice. “Amy is sharp, energetic and resourceful and consistently looking for ways to help principal investigators design studies and analyze data,” he says. “It was a real delight to extend an offer to someone whose career interests aligned so closely with the hospital’s mission. Some people are motivated by making an impact, and that’s Amy.”