Nate Wiecha
Hello! I am Dr. Nate Wiecha, a postdoctoral research trainee in the Department of Biostatistics at the Gillings School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I work in Li Lab with Professor Didong Li. I completed my PhD in Statistics in Fall 2025 at North Carolina State University under the direction of Professor Brian Reich.
My research interests are primarily in methodology and applications related to epidemiology and environmental health. My dissertation researched proposed Double Spatial Regression, a method for conducting spatial regression analysis under “spatial confounding” (when an unobserved confounder is a function of space; published in Biometrics), examined when novel methods for analyzing mixtures of environmental exposures are superior to general methods (published in Environmental Epidemiology), and proposed a method for assessing variable importance in nonparametric Bayesian models.
Since completing my dissertation, I have been continuing to work on spatial confounding, and nonparametric hypothesis testing. I greatly enjoy collaborating with both statisticians and scientists, and have been fortunate to work on the GenX Cohort Study at NC State and the Superfund Project 3 at UNC Chapel Hill. I also enjoy teaching and was lucky to teach a great cohort of students in BIOS 600, Principles of Statistical Inference, this past Spring, and plan to teach the course again in Spring 2027.
Contact: [nwiecha] [at] [unc.edu]