Sahir Bhatnagar

Welcome to my website. I’m Sahir, a biostatistician who uses statistical methods to answer questions that are important to clinicians. After obtaining my PhD in Biostatistics, I joined McGill University as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, and Diagnostic Radiology. My research has focused on developing statistical methods for analyzing high-dimensional data in genomics and radiomics. I’ve published in journals such as Nature Genetics, PLoS Medicine, Biometrics, Bioinformatics, Statistics and Computing, PLoS Genetics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, and the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education. I’m grateful to have been funded by an NSERC Discovery grant with launch supplement and several CIHR Project Grants.

I’m also the author of several R packages that have been downloaded over 250,000 times. The most rewarding part of my job has been training and supervising students. I’ve supervised 3 Masters, 5 PhD, and 4 undergraduate students, and taught a Masters level course in Biostatistics for 4 years with an average enrollment of 100 students.

Despite these academic accomplishments, I transitioned to industry, driven by a desire to apply my expertise in environments that prioritize reproducibility and robust coding practices. At Deep Genomics, as a Senior Research Scientist, I continued my journey in genomic analysis, contributing significantly to the identification of new drug targets using whole genome sequencing data. Currently, as the Associate Director at 5 Prime Sciences, I provide large pharmaceutical partners with human genetics evidence to de-risk their drug development pipelines.

I am keenly aware that the choice between academia and industry is a topic of significant debate and personal contemplation. If you are navigating this decision or simply wish to discuss the intricacies of this choice, I welcome you to reach out. Sharing perspectives and experiences can illuminate the path for those standing at this crucial crossroad.

While I am no longer taking on graduate students, I maintain a connection to academia as an Adjunct Professor at McGill.