Faculty Profile

Kevin He

Kevin He, PhD

  • Associate Professor, Biostatistics

Kevin He has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan since 2014, where he currently serves as Associate Director of the Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center (KECC). From 2017 to 2019, Dr. He was Biostatistical Lead for the United States Renal Data System (USRDS). He now serves as Biostatistical Lead for two contracts from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS): the Kidney Disease Quality Measure Development, Maintenance, and Support (Measures) project, and the Utilization of Data Indicators in the ESRD Survey Process (Oversights) project. Through these roles, he leads national efforts to maintain and develop statistical models and standardized measures for evaluating U.S. dialysis facilities, transplant centers, and Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs).

His research focuses on survival analysis, healthcare provider profiling, machine learning, data integration, transfer learning, knowledge distillation, federated learning, synthetic data generation, statistical optimization, causal inference, and statistical genetics. He applies these methods to diverse clinical areas including organ transplantation, kidney dialysis, acute kidney injury, psoriasis, cancer, and stroke. His work is driven by large, complex datasets such as national disease registries, claims data, and high-throughput genomics, epigenomics, and transcriptomics.

  • PhD, Biostatistics, University of Michigan, 2012
  • MS, Biostatistics, University of Michigan, 2008
  • BS, Statistics, Queen's University, 2006
  • MS, Epidemiology, Queen's University, 2004
  • BM, Clinical Medicine, Dalian Medical University, 2002

Research Interest:

Survival analysis, healthcare provider profiling, machine learning, data integration, transfer learning, knowledge distillation, federated learning, synthetic data generation, statistical optimization, causal inference, statistical genetics, organ transplantation, kidney dialysis, acute kidney injury, psoriasis, cancer, and stroke.


Research Projects:

Through his roles at KECC, Dr. He leads national initiatives to maintain and develop statistical models and standardized measures for evaluating U.S. dialysis facilities, transplant centers, and Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs). He is also Principal Investigator of an NIH R01 grant focused on advancing statistical methods for profiling healthcare providers. 

In collaboration with clinical and methodological partners, he has developed statistical models and computational tools for data integration, transfer learning, knowledge distillation, and federated learning. These approaches—applied to post-transplant outcomes, kidney allocation decisions, polygenic risk scores, and polygenic hazard scores—integrate published prediction models with newly collected data to improve predictive performance while addressing critical challenges such as heterogeneity, limited data sharing, and privacy constraints.

Wang, D., Ye, W., Sung, R., Jiang, H., Taylor, J.M.G., Ly, L. and He, K. (2025). Kullback-Leibler-based discrete failure time models for integration of published prediction models with new time-to-event dataset. Annals of Applied Statistics, 19(2): 1167-1189.

Hartman, N., Messana, J.M., Kang, J., Naik, S.A., Shearon, T. and He, K. (2024). Composite scores for transplant center evaluation: a new individualized empirical null method. Annals of Applied Statistics, 18(1), 729-748.

Wu, W., Kalbfleisch, J.D., Taylor, J.M.G., Kang, J. and He, K. (2024). Competing risk modeling with bivariate varying coefficients to understand the dynamic impact of COVID-19. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 33(4), 1252-1263.

He, K., Kang, J., Zhu, J. and Li, Y. (2022). Stratified Cox models with time-varying effects for national kidney transplant patients: a new block-wise steepest ascent method. Biometrics, 78(3), 1221-1232.

He, K., Dahlerus, C., Xia, L., Li, Y.M. and Kalbfleisch, J.D. (2020). The profiling inter-unit reliability. Biometrics, 76(2), 654-663.

Suite 3645, Room 3655 SPH I
1415 Washington Heights
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Email: kevinhe@umich.edu
Office: 734-764-2279

For media inquiries: sph.media@umich.edu

Areas of Expertise: Biostatistics,  Cancer,  Chronic Disease,  COVID-19,  Genetics,  Global Public Health,  Health Care,  Health Equity,  Precision Health