90.5 WESA - Who’s needed to fight the battle? At the October 2, 2017, conference sponsored by the PUBLIC HEALTH DYNAMICS LABORATORY and CTSI, CDC’s Sarah Bacon said an essential group of people must crunch the numbers to better understand the hows and the whys of the crisis: mathematicians, epidemiologists, data scientists, and statisticians.
SAUMYADIPTA PYNE, scientific director for the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL) has been selected to receive two oration awards, both of which will be presented to him in India in November: The 2017 Subha Mukherjee Memorial Oration from the Physiological Society of India, and the Kiruba Sankar Memorial Oration from the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences in Bangalore.
PITTWIRE - On Saturday evening, October 18, 2017, the inaugural Goldman Prize Competition judges announced an $10,000 award for Triple Note: A Data Collection and Instruction App developed by LAUREL CHIAPPETTA, biostatistics core instructor, and Mary Margaret Kerr. The program helps field researchers store and access data, video, images, audio, ad other information in a single cloud-based source.
Saumyadipta Pyne will join the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL) as its scientific director and will also serve as an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics, both at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, beginning October 1. “I am very excited that Dr. Pyne will be joining PHDL with an associate professor appointment in our biostatistics department,” commented Shyamal Peddada, chair of the Departmen...
After landing a research position at the Massachusetts General Hospital Biostatistics Center, Kristina Boyd was encouraged to pursue public heath as a career. In addition to serving as a research assistant in the UPMC Department of Emergency Medicine, she is a wife and mother to a 2-year-old. Though balancing motherhood and graduate school can be difficult, she wants people to know that "it is possible and it is so worth it."
We welcome SHYAMAL D. PEDDADA as the new chair of the Department of Biostatistics. He comes to us from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), where he was the acting branch chief of the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch and a senior tenured investigator. He also held adjunct appointments as professor of biostatistics at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill and professor...
INSURANCE JOURNAL - “Our findings will affect regulatory agencies and how they set exposure standards,” said principal investigator GARY MARSH, professor of biostatistics and director/founder of the school’s Center for Occupational Biostatistics and Epidemiology. “It is very good news that the workers in this industry are not at increased risk of death due to the materials used in their occupation, both for the employees and for the hard metal in...
SCIENCE - Incoming biostatistics chair, SHYAMAL PEDDADA, offers an invited scholarly review of research by Smits et al. into how the gut microbiome in hunter-gatherer communities responds to seasonal changes in diet, activity, and the external environment. Even as high gut microbial diversity contributes protective effects among long-lived hunter gatherers, this microbial diversity is dropping among modernizing societies.
RNA-SEQ BLOG - Important work by biostatistics and human genetics professor GEORGE TSENG and biostatistics PhD student TIANZHOU MA proposes a full Bayesian hierarchical model for RNA-seq meta-analysis by modelling count data, integrating information across genes and across studies, and modelling potentially heterogeneous differential signals across studies via latent variables.
KVOA NEWS 4 - New prediction tools to identify patients at risk of inappropriate prescription opioid use, while allowing safe administration of legitimate pain management are being developed by alumna WEI-HSUAN JENNY LO-CIGANIC (BIOST '10, EPI '05), now an assistant professor with the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy. Her newly-funded work builds on research she completed as a postdoctoral associate at Pitt's HEALTH POLICY INSTITUTE.