Xinjun (David) Wang (BIOST ’22) has been awarded a graduate student fellowship from UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. He received a perfect review score in the application despite the strong competition this year. The fellowship will provide support for two years for him to work on his thesis “Machine Learning and Statistical Methods for Analyzing Single-cell Multi-omics Data.” Congratulations Xinjun!
Liwen Wu (BIOST '21) has been selected as a scholarship recipient for the 2020 ASA Biopharmaceutical Section's Student Scholarship Award. She will receive an award certificate and a check in the amount of $1,000. Congratulations Liwen!
Congratulations to doctoral candidate Tao Sun (BIOS '20) who was awarded Best Oral Presentation at the annual Biostatistics Research Day on February 27 for his work on "GWAS-based Deep Learning for Survival Prediction.”
Masters student Eli Lovelace (BIOS '20) won the Best Presentation award in local Kaggle Competition using the web-based data repository. The Pittsburgh Data Science Meetup Group hosted a Kaggle Competition on February 18, awarding prizes in two categories: most accurate model and best presentation. Lovelace won first place in the best presentation category.
Congratulations to master's candidate Jason Kennedy (BIOST MS '20) who was awarded Best Poster Presentation at the annual Biostatistics Research Day on February 27 for his work on “The association between clinical phenotype cohesiveness and sepsis transitions after presentation.”
Congratulations to doctoral candidate Qing Yin (BIOS '20) who received an honorable mention for his poster presentation at the annual Biostatistics Research Day on February 27 for his work on “Semi-parametric Shape Restricted Mixed Effect Regression Spline with Application on State-Wide Prenatal Screening Program Data.”
Congratulations to doctoral student Yue (Luna) Wei (BIOS '21) on winning Best Oral Presentation Honorable Mention at the annual Biostatistics Research Day on February 27 for her work on “A Simultaneous Inference Procedure to Identify Subgroups in Targeted Therapy Development with Time-to-event Outcomes.”
Congratulations to Yichen Jia (BIOST ’22, front-left) and Peng Liu (BIOST '16 '21, front-right), winners of the national ENAR Distinguished Paper Award. The two doctoral students will present their award-winning work at one of the country's largest professional gatherings of biostatisticians, the ENAR Spring Meeting in Nashville, March 22–25. Pitt Biostatistics students are consistently recognized among these top student researchers.
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Just like with his interest in preventative medicine, Ruishen Lyu (BIOST MS '20) had two main reasons for choosing Pitt from among the other universities to which he was accepted. The first was the great reputation of a large research university like the University of Pittsburgh. The second was the program itself and what it offered. In researching the academic components of the program and hearing from students and alums via online message boar...
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Arvon Clemons (BIOST '21) was awarded the Commonwealth Equity Scholarship for academic year 2019-20.
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Dominic DiSanto (BIOST '20) was awarded the Commonwealth Equity Scholarship for the academic year of 2019-20.
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Ashika Mani (BIOST MS '21) joined Pitt Public Health this year via our Accelerated Bachelor's/Master's Program. “It was a pretty natural choice as I was looking to jumpstart my graduate studies early,” she said. “I was almost done with my undergraduate requirements.” She felt like she had so much more to learn beyond her undergraduate degree program and felt that grad school was the next step. Mani grew up in Yorktown Heights, NY and then came t...
“I’m especially excited about my health data science concentration. It’s a very dynamic skill set and one that translates well to all different kinds of problems," said Dominic DiSanto (BIOST MS '21). "The curriculum in general looks like a very applied curriculum and the idea of having a consulting practicum where you actually work with real researchers and real data is something that I didn’t see in any other program. It seems very focused on ...
Part of what led Arvon Clemons to Pitt Public Health was the city of Pittsburgh. He felt a connection to a city that was similar to his hometown of St. Louis. His academic background doesn’t feel as congruous with his current study. But ultimately, both the city and the program are turning out to be a good fit. Clemons studied biochemistry and biotechnology at the University of Missouri in a dual degree program that allowed him to graduate with ...
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Lingyun Lyu (BIOST PhD '22) is a second-year Ph.D. student in Biostatistics at Pitt Public Health. She came to Pitt in 2016 and earned her M.S. in Biostatistics in 2018. She loved the master’s program and thinks that it’s really well-designed. In addition to many essential statistical theory and applied courses, this program also includes a research-based thesis project. That’s what really made her time in the master’s program worthwhile and one...
Kayleigh Adamson (BIOST MS '20) is from Crawford County in Northwestern Pennsylvania. With about 60 people in her graduating class, she grew up a self-described rural country girl. She started college at Penn State Behrend in Erie, PA, transferring to main campus for her junior and senior years. At Penn State, she studied neuropsychology while minoring in both biology and sexuality and gender studies. Plus getting a certificate in crime psycholo...
Kristina Boyd (BIOST '19) will receive the 2020 award, created in 2013 by the American Statistical Association in partnership with the International Chinese Statistical Association in rememberance of Lingzi Lu, the first-year student in the statistics master's program at Boston University who lost her life in the bombing at the Boston Marathon in April of that year. Since the award's inception, the Pitt Public Health Department of Biostatistics ...
“I started doing research in the second year of my master’s program and that’s where I started to feel like research is kind of exciting and I enjoy doing it. My advisor at that time was Dr. Jonathan Yabes, who is also a graduate of our program and who is now working in the medical school. He helped me a lot and is a very nice person. I like the challenge – especially when the research is new and there are some tangible problems to solve.”
Kristina Boyd (BIOST '19) has been selected to participate in the JSM Diversity Workshop and mentoring program at this year's Joint Statistical Meetings taking place in Denver July 28-31. She was also granted a travel award to attend. Those selected will participate in daily sessions, career enhancement activities, group and individual mentoring, and will have the opportunity to develop a peer network among other participants.
The Department of Biostatistics awarded two prizes. First place went to Junyao Wang (PhD '20) and second place went to Jerry Zhang (PhD '22).