About me

Welcome! I am a curious biologist that is interested in applying statistics to address real world problems, especially ones related to animal and human welfare.

My career path has been diverse.

  • My PhD work focused on organismal responses (ants) to climate change and involved various -omic (transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic) analyses at the University of Vermont, mentored by Drs. Nicholas J. Gotelli and Sara Helms Cahan.
  • For my postdoctoral experience in Dr. Dan Hahn's lab at the University of Florida, I worked on understanding seasonal timing in agricultural pests through transcriptomic and survival analyses.
  • As a Regulatory Scientific Strategist at PSCI, I designed experiments and analyzed results for in vitro methods with the goal of supporting regulatory decision-making around safety of medical devices and I performed a restrospective analysis of chronic toxicity studies to inform regulatory decision-making for pesticide testing.
  • Currently, I am a biostatistician at the Orlando Health Cancer Institute, where I support clinical research and clinical trials.

  • The culmination of my experiences has sharpened my analytical and statistical tools to address an array of real world problems.

    CV and Publications

    1. Petersen, E. J., Nguyen, AD., et al. (2021) “Characteristics to consider when selecting a positive control material for an in vitro assay”, ALTEX - Alternatives to animal experimentation. doi: 10.14573/altex.2102111. *Both authors contributed equally; Paper link

    2. Nguyen AD et al. 2019. Trade-Offs in Cold Resistance at the Northern Range Edge of the Common Woodland Ant Aphaenogaster picea (Formicidae). The American Naturalist. 194:6.Paper link

    3. Nguyen AD, Gotelli NJ, Helms Cahan S. 2016. The evolution of heat shock protein sequences, cis-regulatory elements, and expression profiles in the eusocial Hymenoptera. BMC Evolutionary Biology 16:15.PDF

    4. Nguyen AD, DeNovellis K, Resendez S, Pustilnik JD, Gotelli NJ, Parker JD, Cahan SH. 2017. Effects of desiccation and starvation on thermal tolerance and the heat-shock response in forest ants. J Comp Physiol B:1–10. Paper link

    5. Powell THQ, Nguyen AD, et al. 2020. A rapidly evolved shift in life‐history timing during ecological speciation is driven by the transition between developmental phases. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 33:10. Paper link

    6. Helms Cahan S, Nguyen AD, Zhou Y. Population genomics supports multiple hybrid zone origins of socially hybridogenetic lineages of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants. Evolution (N Y). 2022;76(5):1016-1032. doi:10.1111/evo.14481

    7. Helms Cahan S, Nguyen AD, Stanton-Geddes J, Penick CA, Hernáiz-Hernández Y, DeMarco BB, Gotelli NJ. 2017. Modulation of the heat shock response is associated with acclimation to novel temperatures but not adaptation to climatic variation in the ants Aphaenogaster picea and A. rudis. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology 204:113–120.Paper link Data

    8. Stevens L, Lima-Cordón RA, Helms Cahan S, Nguyen AD, et al. Catch me if you can: Under-detection of Trypanosoma cruzi (Kinetoplastea: Trypanosomatida) infections in Triatoma dimidiata s.l. (Hemiptera: Reduviidae) from Central America. Acta Trop. 2021;224:106130. doi:10.1016/J.ACTATROPICA.2021.106130

    9. Stanton-Geddes J, Nguyen A, Chick L, Vincent J, Vangala M, Dunn RR, Ellison AM, Sanders NJ, Gotelli NJ, Cahan SH. 2016. Thermal reactionomes reveal divergent responses to thermal extremes in warm and cool-climate ant species. BMC Genomics 17:171. PDF Github repo

    10. Cicconardi F,..,Nguyen AD,..,Steiner FM,Schlick-Steiner, BC. 2020. Genomic signature of shifts in selection in a sub-alpine ant and its physiological adaptations. Molecular Biology and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaa076

    11. Lau MK, Ellison AM, Nguyen A, Penick C, DeMarco B, Gotelli NJ, Sanders NJ, Dunn RR, Helms Cahan S. 2019. Draft Aphaenogaster genomes expand our view of ant genome size variation across climate gradients. PeerJ 7:e6447 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6447