Deok Ryun Kim, Ph.D., is the Head of the Biostatistics and Data Management department with over 30 years of experience in Statistics in the fields of clinical trials and observational studies. Her work includes providing statistical expertise in protocol development, statistical considerations, and regulatory submission, as well as providing functional input in proposals, contracts, and budget activities while overseeing the planning, execution, and analysis of projects in other functional aspects.

Since she joined IVI in 2000, she has been working on various epidemiological studies of disease surveillance and serological surveillance of cholera, typhoid, shigella, dengue, and Schistosomiasis, and various clinical trials of cholera, typhoid, rotavirus, Covid-19, Chikungunya, Hepatitis E, and Schistosomiasis vaccines, conducted in various low-and middle-income countries. She has also led and overseen randomization schemes, sample size/power calculation, novel statistical methods, and statistical analysis plans in various study designs including immune non-inferiority/equivalence design, case-control design, test negative design, individual randomized efficacy/effectiveness design, cluster randomized efficacy/effectiveness design. In addition, she has been working on geospatial statistical analysis to evaluate the clustering of diseases in space, to identify environmental factors for the clustering of the diseases, to evaluate vaccine herd effects by examining geographic variation of the health intervention, to identify spatial variations of health interventions, to evaluate the impact of health intervention on transmission of diseases in space, and to create spatial variables to include in health/study data analysis.

Since 2013, she has also expanded her career to global vaccine safety. She has been involved in the development of the first version of the desktop-based Vaccine Adverse Event Information Monitoring System (VAEIMS) in collaboration with the World Health Organization which can be easily deployed at the national level. She is actively supporting low- and middle-income countries and manufacturers to build up minimum capacity of vaccine safety monitoring through the deployment of VAEIMS to ultimately benefit global public health.

She earned a Master of Science in Statistics (minor in Computer Science) and a Doctor of Philosophy in Statistics at Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, Korea.