Chan School grad believes biostatistics can penetrate cancer’s puzzles
This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates. Daniel Schlauch doesn’t so much love data as love making it work for him. He downloads the numbers that describe his life, from his Fitbit, his Uber app, and wherever else they accumulate in his data-centric world. “I keep track of all of those kinds of things in my life,” Schlauch said. “I’m not quite sure why other people don’t enjoy it as much.” When he was 5, he learned algebra — badly, he admits — from his grandmother; he was “a big math nerd” in high school; and he earned a degree in math at Wesleyan University. He and a few data-driven friends there took a numbers approach to online poker, winning enough for a post-graduation sail through the Caribbean. His aptitude with numbers won him a job in the Computational Biology and Functional Genomics Lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer...