How important are research interests? Should I reach out to professors?

[bernoulli_babe]

For statistics / biostatistics PhD programs, how important are research interests? Should I directly reach out to professors concerning research alignment? For example, I've been working extensively with EHR data and Bayesian statistics and have a few professors I'd like to work with. I spent hours researching programs and people that would be the best fit. My question is how important this research alignment is in the application process? 

On a side note, how important are poster papers in the application cycle? I've worked on 5+ posters so far and am working on 2-3 papers that'll hopefully get published. I only have 3 papers to my name and they're not nearly as theoretical. 

If you can could you list programs where reaching out to individual professors would have a marginal effect? 

My concern is that I have the weakest math background (CS major) among my peers but I'd love a stats or more theoretical biostats program since I'd prefer proving error bounds etc. 

[Stat Assistant Professor]

You can feel free to reach out to professors if you have genuine questions about their *research* (not about admissions). It seems like in your case, you have legitimate research experience, so you could certainly discuss that with them. However, keep in mind that admissions decisions are made at the departmental level, so it's not as if a professor accepts you as their PhD student right away (indeed you would also likely need to pass qualifying exams *before* you are can even choose a PhD advisor). Additionally, don't take it personally if you don't hear back from them. Some professors may actually not be able to respond to inquiries from applicants who have not yet been accepted into the program.

Either way, reaching out is unlikely to affect your chances of getting admitted. If you are really interested in working with a faculty, you could mention that in your statement of purpose. "Name dropping" doesn't usually help either, but if you have meaningful research experience, that could be one of the few exceptions.     

Your research experience should certainly enhance your application. 2-3 papers is very impressive for an applicant to a Stat/Biostat PhD program. Have you taken real analysis or any other advanced math/stat classes? Depending on your academic pedigree and the depth of your research (which sounds pretty legit), these things may be able to compensate for a slightly thinner math background (within reason). Since you have a degree in a STEM/quantitative field, that should also provide some assurance about quantitative abilities (it's not like you're going from something like religious studies to statistics). Finally, if you are a domestic applicant, then you can possibly get by with a thinner math background. In my opinion, this is not so much an issue once research starts. Though international students usually are more "advanced" than the average American PhD statistics student, these differences go away over time, and everyone is more-or-less on the same level once courses are done and the focus is on research (actually, some students who ace the classes/exams/etc. might struggle a lot with research, and vice versa  -- so it kind of averages out).  

[StatsG0d]

Check out @cyberwulf's post stickied to this forum. In it, he indicates that research interests matter very minimally.