Leading biostatisticians and scholars are featured in our weekly department seminar series which covers a wide range of topics, issues and methods relevant to the field of biostatistics.  

Spring 2026 Seminars

Seminars for Spring 2026 are held Thursdays from 3:30-4:30 p.m. PDT unless otherwise listed. Check our calendar to view confirmed speakers. 

Seminar Recordings

Links to seminar recordings from our 2025-26 academic year. When speakers have granted permission for recording and posting, session recordings are typically available within 1–2 business days after the seminar date.

Spring 2026

• Tools for Interpreting Single-Cell Differentiation Trajectories presented May 7 by Manu Setty, PhD, Associate Professor, Basic Sciences Division and Herbold Computational Biology Program, Public Health Sciences Division, Fred Hutch Cancer Center
• Minimax optimal causal inference in high dimensions presented April 23 by Edward Kennedy, PhD, Associate Professor Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Recording available to UW Biostatistics students, faculty and staff upon request.
• Robust methods for meta-analysis of dose-response relationships presented April 9 by Aleksandr Aravkin, PhD, Associate Professor, UW Department of Applied Mathematics; Director, Math Sciences, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation; Adjunct Professor, Health Metrics Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science & Engineering.

Winter 2026

• Advancing Cancer Risk Prediction: Multi-Ancestry PRS, Model Recalibration, and Benefit-Burden Evaluation presented March 12 by Li Hsu, PhD, Professor, Biostatistics Program, Fred Hutch Cancer Center; Affiliate Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington
• Fast diagonal single-cell multi-omics integration with self-mapping presented March 5 by Leying Guan, PhD, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Yale University.
• Debiased Machine Learning Meets Shape Constraints: Modern Inference on Monotone Functions presented February 26 by Marco Carone, PhD, Professor and Interim Associate Chair, Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington
• 2026 Prentice Lecture: Evolving Designs and Analyses of Publicly Funded Cancer Clinical Trials presented February 19 by Michael LeBlanc, PhD, Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington; Professor Biostatistics Program, Fred Hutch Cancer Center
• Evaluating the Evaluators: Measuring Uncertainty and Failure in LLMs and LLM Judges presented February 12, by Lucy Lu Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington
• Inference on Local Variable Importance Measures for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects presented February 6 by Pawel Morzywolek, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen,
• Integrating Machine Learning into Survival Analysis through Distribution-Free Conformal Prediction presented January 22 by Yu Shen, PhD, Oestmann Family Foundation Chair for Cancer Research, Division of Discovery Science, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
• Statistics in the Age of AI: Theory, Methods, and Data presented January 15 by Didong Li, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Autumn 2025

• Integrating genetics and single-cell genomics to define non-coding mechanisms of common and rare diseases presented November 20 by Saori Sakaue, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genome Sciences, University of Washington,
• Statistical Frameworks for Dissecting Genetic Regulation in the Human Transcriptome presented November 13 by Pejman Mohammadi, PhD, Associate Professor, UW School of Medicine; Principal Investigator, Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
• Detecting conditional dependence in practice: why it's so hard, and what we can do presented November 6 by Danica Sutherland, PhD, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, The University of British Columbia
• Leveraging Statistical Machine Learning Models to Characterize the Progression of Neurodegenerative Diseases presented October 23 by Mariano Gabitto, PhD, Allen Institute for Brain Sciences, Affiliate Professor of Statistics, University of Washington.
• l1-Regularized Generalized Least Squares presented October 16, 2025 by Alex Gibberd, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Statistics, Lancaster University.
• Generalization Beyond Data: A Distributional Perspective presented October 2, 2025 by Xinwei Shen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Statistics, University of Washington