Congratulations to two University of Washington Biostatistics students who have won first place in the 2026 American Statistical Association (ASA) Student Paper Competitions in the Section in Genomics and Genetics.
Ana Gabriela Vasconcelos
Ana Gabriela Vasconcelos is a PhD student who won for her paper, “Accounting for Spatial Correlation in Network Analysis of Spatial Transcriptomics Data.”
The paper proposes a general framework that accounts for spatial structure and technical variability, helping distinguish biologically meaningful gene relationships from correlations driven by shared location.
Spatial transcriptomics is a new technology that allows researchers to measure gene expression within intact tissues, opening the door to many new biological questions about how cells function in their native environments. However, the spatial nature of the data can create challenges when studying gene–gene relationships, as genes expressed in the same locations may appear correlated even when they are not biologically linked.
“The approach naturally extends to multi-sample studies and allows researchers to investigate how gene relationships vary across tissue regions or biological conditions, as well as to construct more reliable gene co-expression matrices for downstream analyses such as module discovery,” said Vasconcelos.
Zhaoheng Li
Zhaoheng Li is a PhD student who won for her paper, “MIRAGE: Manifold-Informed Gene-module Extraction for Disentangling Simultaneous Dynamics in Single-Cell RNA-seq,” which offers a new way to interpret single-cell RNA sequencing data when multiple biological processes occur simultaneously within a cell population.
For example, cells may be differentiating while also participating in the cell cycle, responding to stress, or shifting its metabolism. In these settings, mapping cells onto a single trajectory using all highly variable genes might obscure important underlying signals. To address this challenge, MIRAGE builds separate cell–cell graphs from different gene sets and then uses statistical tests to determine whether two gene sets reflect the same biological process.
The Student Paper Award plays an important role in recognizing and encouraging outstanding work by students in our field. These students earn a cash prize and are invited to present their work at the ASA’s Joint Statistical Meetings in 2026.
