Line Kühnel, industrial postdoc
Line Kühnel started in April 2019 as an industrial postdoc at the Department of Mathematical Sciences in collaboration with Lundbeck A/S. She is a member of the Statistics and Probability section.
Earlier this year, the Innovation Fund Denmark and Lundbeck A/S granted Line a three-year industrial postdoc to work with non-linear mixed-effects models to analyze disease progression in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease. The aim is to investigate how cognition and biomarkers develop through the diseases, as well as to investigate whether patients with specific disease patterns can be identified.
The commonly used models for analyzing the progression of Alzheimer's disease, for example in clinical trials of potentially new drugs, do not take into account differences in disease stage in patients in a consistent manner. In the project, Line focuses on developing a flexible type of non-linear mixed-effects models that can adjust for disease stage variation based on the observed data.
Non-linear mixed-effects models are notoriously difficult to “fit”. Part of the project will be to develop methods and software that result in good fits without manual fine-tuning to achieve convergence of the parameter estimates. Lars Lau Rocket from Lundbeck and Bo Markussen from MATH are the main partners in the project.
Line obtained her master's degree in Statistics at the Department of Mathematical Sciences in 2015, and then took a PhD at the Department of Computer Science, which dealt with Stochastic Modelling on Manifolds. Line can be found at MATH once a week. Send her an email at rxl558@ku.dk and arrange a meeting.