Four PhD students mentored by University of Washington biostatistics faculty Ting Ye through her TREND lab, have been recognized with 2026 Student Paper Competition honors from the American Statistical Association (ASA).
Ye, an assistant professor of biostatistics, was thrilled about her students' achievements.
“Four students who work in our research lab submitted papers to the ASA Student Paper Competition, and all four received awards. This is a remarkable accomplishment and reflects the exceptional quality of research and mentorship taking place in our department,” said Ye.
Ye's TREND Lab is a research innovation lab for human health advances dedicated to data-driven discovery, development and delivery of clinical, medical and scientific breakthroughs, spanning the design and analysis of complex innovative clinical trials, causal inference in large-scale biomedical data, and rigorous and fit-for-purpose AI for health.
Each student’s paper addresses a distinct methodological challenge, but together exemplify the mission behind the name of the lab.
Student Award Recipients
Yilin Song
Yilin Song, a UW Biostatistics graduate (PhD ‘25) who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, received the Norman Breslow Early Career Award from the ASA Section on Statistics in Epidemiology. This award holds special significance for the UW Biostatistics department as it honors the legacy of long-time UW faculty mentor Norman Breslow. Song’s breakthrough method enables borrowing of external controls in single-arm or active-controlled trials while allowing for unmeasured differences between external and internal data sources, using negative control variables to correct for bias. Notably, Song also received an award from the Biopharmaceutical Section but accepted the Epidemiology Section honor instead.
Yuhan Qian
Yuhan Qian is a third-year UW PhD student who earned third place paper honors in the Biopharmaceutical Section for his innovative work using Gaussian processes to incorporate nonconcurrent controls in platform trial analysis. His approach uniquely leverages the continuous enrollment structure inherent to platform trials, recognizing that patients enrolled closer in time share greater similarity and such fresh perspective distinguishes this work from existing methods.
Shiyu Wan
Shiyu Wan is a second-year UW PhD student who received honorable mention in the Biopharmaceutical Section for his paper addressing re-enrollment in master protocol trials. This work tackles the important challenge of how to handle participants who complete one treatment period and later enroll in another, clarifying the scientific questions at stake and enabling fuller use of data collected in these complex trial designs.
Sizhu Lu
Sizhu Lu is a PhD student from University of California, Berkeley who received second place in the Biopharmaceutical Section Student Paper Award for her work on handling multiple competing intercurrent events in clinical trials. This research addresses a critical challenge in the rigorous interpretation of modern clinical trials, directly engaging with the recent estimand discussions featured in the New England Journal of Medicine. Lu’s project was co-supervised by Ye and Peng Ding, associate professor of statistics at UC Berkeley.
Congratulations to all students for their excellent work.
