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In the News

Headlines featuring UW Biostatistics people and research.
Yates Coley stands atop a mountain peak
Yates Coley stands atop a mountain peak
What motivates Yates Coley’s work to build equitable prediction models?
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI),

Yates Coley, PhD, UW faculty member and associate investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI), recently received an Emerging Leader Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.

graphic of person working at a computer
graphic of person working at a computer
Data Gaps
UW SPH Magazine,

Investigators commonly find mixtures of DNA in a single forensic sample that contain various unequal contributions, like the DNA samples that could come from multiple people using one knife. Now, the development of technologies can reveal and identify smaller, previously undetectable amounts of DNA samples within the mixture, which enables more specific DNA identification. Faculty member Bruce Weir is interviewed.

Absract image representing all aspects of healthcare
Absract image representing all aspects of healthcare
Simpler models to identify suicide risk perform similarly to more complex ones
Kaiser Permanente Washington Research Center,

Models for suicide preventions that are easier to explain and use could have better uptake in health care settings. UW Biostatistics Affiliate Faculty Susan Shortreed was lead author on this recent study which compares the performance of 5 different models developed to identify a patient's risk of suicidal behavior.

Mosaic HIV immunogens boost the breadth of vaccine immune responses
Mosaic HIV immunogens boost the breadth of vaccine immune responses
Mosaic HIV immunogens boost the breadth of vaccine immune responses
Fred Hutch,

Mosaic and consensus HIV-1 immunogen vaccines were tested in a clinical trial led by a team of researchers including Drs. Kristen Cohen, Andrew Fiore-Gartland, Peter Gilbert and M. Juliana McElrath from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division. Their findings were published recently in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Optogenetics illustration
Optogenetics illustration
UW-led team receives $4.2M grant to develop AI-guided brain stimulation methods aimed at treating mental health disorders
UW Electrical & Computer Engineering,

Ali Shojaie will be a member of new multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team that recently received a five-year, $4.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop neural stimulation techniques guided by artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning methods.

Ross Prentice
Ross Prentice
Fred Hutch’s Dr. Ross Prentice retires
Fred Hutch News,

Only a handful of scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have been around longer than the institution itself; longtime public health researcher Ross Prentice, PhD, who retired at the end of 2022, is one of them.

Photos of Lu Xia and Ali Shojaie
Photos of Lu Xia and Ali Shojaie
Metabolomic Signatures Associated With Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Outcomes
National Library of Medicine,

UW Biostatistics postdoc Lu Xia is first author, and faculty member Ali Shojaie a co-author, of research that found distinct plasma metabolomic profiles are associated with right ventricular dilation, mortality, and measures of disease severity in pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Jonathan Wakefield
Jonathan Wakefield
The WHO estimates of excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic
Nature,

The World Health Organization has a mandate to compile and disseminate statistics on mortality, and we have been tracking the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic since the beginning of 2020. Here we report a comprehensive and consistent measurement of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by estimating excess deaths, by month, for 2020 and 2021.