People

People

Our lab works in statistical genetics, biostatistics, clinical research, and research software development at Michigan Medicine and the School of Public Health.

Current team

Portrait of Lars Fritsche

Lars Fritsche, PhD

Lab Head

Research Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Biostatistics and a faculty member of the Chronic Pain & Fatigue Research Center

Lars works with collaborators to combine genetic, clinical, patient-reported, and mobile data in studies of treatment response and disease risk.

Portrait of Ryan Welch

Ryan Welch, PhD

Application Programmer/Analyst Lead

Anesthesiology

Lab member since 2026

Ryan uses genetic and molecular data to better understand complex human traits and improve clinical decision-making.

Sarah Fazal, PhD

Research Fellow

Anesthesiology

Lab member since 2025

Sarah brings experience in human genetics and bioinformatics to the lab’s pain genetics and phenotyping research.

Co-mentored through U-M's HEAL PAIN T90/R90 program.

Shivalika Pathania, PhD

Research Fellow

Biostatistics

Lab member since 2025

Shivalika is a computational biologist and bioinformatician with experience in integrative omics and biological network analysis.

Tai Yang, MS

Graduate Student Research Assistant (GSRA) and PhD Candidate

Biostatistics

Lab member since 2025

Tai develops and evaluates polygenic scores for mental health phenotypes across biobanks and ancestry groups.

Where alumni go

Former lab members have continued their graduate studies or taken roles in academia and industry. Each entry lists their role in the lab and their next position.

Liying Chen, PhD

Graduate Student Research Assistant (GSRA), 2025 to 2026

Statistician, Eli Lilly and Company

Ying Ma, PhD

Graduate Student Research Assistant (GSRA), 2020 to 2023

Assistant Professor, Brown University School of Public Health

Brandon Hutchison, MS

Graduate Student Research Assistant (GSRA), 2023 to 2024

MS Candidate, Biostatistics, University of Michigan

Snehal Patil, MS

Application Programmer and original developer of the PRSweb portals, 2019 to 2021

Senior Application Programmer, University of Michigan

Jiahan Chen, MS

Graduate Student Research Assistant (GSRA), 2019 to 2019

Research Assistant and PhD student in Bioinformatics, North Carolina State University

Robert Peng, MS

Graduate Student Research Assistant (GSRA), 2017 to 2018

PhD Candidate, Department of Statistics, Northwestern University