Larry Dong

I am a fifth year PhD student in biostatistics at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. My research interests revolve around dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) and Bayesian methods and, on the software side, I take interest in making Bayesian software “better”. For my PhD, I am jointly supervised by Dr. Olli Saarela and Dr. Eleanor Pullenayegum and my thesis focuses on developing Bayesian estimation methods for optimal DTRs using irregularly observed data. On the side, I am also a core developer of PyMC, a GitHub Campus Expert and a co-founder of the Health Data Working Group.

In 2024, I have had the pleasure to spend several months as a Mitacs-JSPS fellow at the University of Tokyo working with Dr. Irene Li, investigating large language models’ usefulness for causal estimation problems. Prior to my PhD studies, I pursued a dual Master’s program: one MSc in biostatistics at McGill University and the other in Public Health Data Science at the University of Bordeaux. I was jointly supervised by Dr. Erica Moodie and Dr. Rodolphe Thiébaut.

In my free time, I enjoy coding in Python, skateboarding and eating fruits. Feel free to connect with me!