University of Washington Biostatistics PhD student Sungtaek Son has received a student travel award from the Applied Statistics Symposium of International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) and runner-up award honors from the Western North American Region (WNAR) of The International Biometric Society for his research on "Dimension reduction and covariate balancing for learning individualized treatment regimes."
“This work will allow us to use the vast library of observational data for decision making that would maximize the desired outcome with the accuracy that was previously achievable only with data generated from well-designed randomized control trial,” said Son, who collaborated with UW professors Gary Chan and Eardi Lila on the research.
In terms of future plans, Son plans to continue his journey in academia. He worked at a biopharmaceutical company prior to starting his PhD program and while his initial thought was to return to industry, he decided to pursue academic positions for the satisfaction that comes from learning and developing new ideas.
“In particular, I would like to delve more into my current research topic on dimension reduction and covariate balancing, and expand the techniques to be used for inference using more complicated data that comes from, for example, wearable devices or brain imaging,” said Son.
