As 2019 comes to a close, we look back on highlights from the past year.
New Leadership
Lurdes Inoue was appointed the new Gilbert S. Omenn Endowed Chair in Biostatistics. She becomes the first woman to chair the department. Timothy Thornton succeeds Inoue as graduate program director.
Sample of 2019 Research News
- UW Biostatistics faculty were among the world's most highly cited researchers for 2019
- Department of Biostatistics faculty and alumni hold leadership roles with the new FDA Sentinel Innovation Center.
- A new study that found that a key Alzheimer’s gene acts differently in non-Europeans. Timothy Thornton was senior author of the study and co-authors included Andréa Horimoto and Ellen Wijsman.
- Robyn McClelland and Kathleen Kerr led the Cohort Design Working Group for the wildly popular Dog Aging Project.
- Marco Carone received a $2.7 million grant to develop novel statistical tools to more effectively describe the health effects of common medical therapies using data from electronic health records (EHRs).
- Amy Willis was awarded a $1.5M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to improve statistical tools used to profile the microbiome using sequencing.
- Ali Shojaie was among the recipients of an $800,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias through analysis of multi-omics data.
New Capstone Program
UW Biostatistics welcomed its first MS Capstone cohort in fall 2019. The new 18-month program awards a master of science in biostatistics degree for students who wish to enter the job market upon graduation.
Sample of 2019 Awards & Recognition
- Elizabeth “Betz” Halloran received recognition from two prestigious organizations this year. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and received the Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Bruce Weir was honored with the 2019 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education.
- Assistant Professor of Biostatistics Marco Carone was named the inaugural Norman Breslow Endowed Faculty Fellow.
- Three members of the Department of Biostatistics received 2019 School of Public Health Excellence Awards: MS student Alexander Paynter, PhD student Phuong Vu, and staff member Akiyo Kodera.
- The American Public Health Association (APHA) awarded the 2019 Mortimer Spiegelman Award to Daniela Witten, professor of statistics and biostatistics and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair in Mathematical Statistics.
- PhD student Eric Morenz was named a Boeing International Fellow and will spend twelve weeks in spring 2020 conducting research at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Community
Family, friends, faculty and staff celebrated our 2019 Biostatistics graduates. From teaching college-level statistics to working as a data scientist at Microsoft, our newest alumni headed off to some exciting new opportunities.
Overfit represented Biostatistics at the 2019 Dawg Dash team competition.
UW Biostatistics Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee established weekly DiversiTEA gatherings as a means to connect students, faculty and staff.
Please consider a gift to the department in support of our students. It is through philanthropy that we continue training experts in the quantitative analysis that is the backbone of scientific breakthroughs.
