Zhe Chen and Kenneth Lee Appointed to Perelman School of Medicine Faculty

Please join us in congratulating Drs. Zhe Chen and Kenneth Lee on their promotions, both to Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics (DBEI) at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Prior to her faculty appointment, Dr. Chen was a postdoctoral fellow mentored by Dr. Michael Harhay. With a PhD in Statistics, Dr. Chen brings expertise in causal inference methods, including randomization inference, instrumental variables, stepped wedge designs, and predictive analytics for trial design.

Prior to his faculty appointment, Dr. Lee was a postdoctoral felow mentored by Drs. Michael Harhay, Kate Courtright, and Fan Li (Yale University). With a PhD in Biostatistics, Dr. Lee brings expertise across nearly every dimension of cluster trials, having led seminal work on time-varying treatment effects, informative cluster sizes, estimands, covariate adjustment, and fixed-effects specifications across design variants including stepped-wedge, crossover, and supplemental cluster-randomized trials.

Both Drs. Chen and Lee join the faculty of the Center for Clinical Trials Innovation (CCTI), founded by Dr. Harhay in 2025, and the affiliated faculty of the PAIR Center. CCTI serves as a dynamic research, training, and collaboration hub that directly informs the conduct and analysis of all trials at the PAIR Center and has broad applications for the research community at large. Dr. Chen will expand CCTI’s Bayesian causal inference program, while Dr. Lee will expand the cluster trial design, analysis, and methodology program.

We congratulate Drs. Chen and Lee on their promotions and are excited to welcome them as faculty in CCTI and as affiliated faculty of the PAIR Center at large.