Student and staff members of the University of Washington Department of Biostatistics were honored with 2024 UW School of Public Health (SPH) Awards of Excellence at a ceremony held on May 14.

Spotlight on UW Biostatistics Student Research: In his first year as a biostatistics PhD student, Jasper Yang hoped to conduct meaningful research. After all, the chance to collaborate with University of Washington and other area researchers was one of the reasons he chose to attend UW.

A research team conducts an in-depth exploration of cryptic plasmid, pBI143, one of more than 68,000 plasmids found in the human gut and which 90 percent of people in the industrialized world possess, and find that pBI143 is much better at detecting human fecal contamination in water samples than the most current state-of-the-art markers, a crucial finding considering that human fecal pollution is a major global health problem.

In our post-COVID pandemic world, several lingering questions remain pertaining to the culprit, SARS-CoV-2. While we can’t answer the question of, will another SARS-CoV-2 pandemic happen again? We can ensure our offensive game is stronger by striving to answer questions like, how good are the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines? UW Professor of Biostatistics Peter Gilbert is one of two Fred Hutch researchers who led a team that investigated these questions and recently published their findings in Nature Communications.

University of Washington Biostatistics graduate Kung-Yee Liang, Distinguished Chair Professor and Senior Advisor for Office of the President at Feng Chia University and former president of the National Health Research Institutes of Taiwan, was the featured speaker at this year’s Norman E. Breslow Distinguished Lecture.