TRIB LIVE - “Some people get reported at a later time and there’s a lag,” said Jong Jeong, biostatistics professor and interim chair. For more clarity you can look at the percentage of positive cases out of tests administered. But it’s still helpful to monitor the trajectory of the virus in the region. Watching case counts rise—even if the rise really occurred weeks ago—helps statisticians and scientists create models and make predictions.
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!
After 49 years and three months, Lynette Clark retired on March 31. As a life member of the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, Lynette has worked extensively with the African American Alumni Council (AAAC) and other campus and community organizations. Read more about Lynette and our other recent retirees.
Biostatistical modeling, estimation, and decision-making support have been playing an important role in responses to COVID-19 challenges. Lu Tang and Andriy Bandos will discuss statistical considerations involved in modeling the epidemic progression and in the use of COVID-19 related tests for estimation and decision making support.
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!
In a letter to the community, Chancellor Gallagher shares his outrage, grief, and anger. He challenges us all to demonstrate solidarity by standing with Pitt’s African American students, faculty, staff, and alumni in a shared commitment to realizing meaningful change. "How many times must we witness these blatant examples of injustice, hatred, brutality, and discrimination before we resolve to change things?" We must plot a path forward.
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MEDRXIV (2/29/20) - Pitt Biostats' Lu Tang and collaborators from Michigan develop a health informatics toolbox that enables public health workers to timely analyze and evaluate the time-course dynamics of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infection using the publicly available data from the China CDC. This toolbox is built upon a hierarchical epidemiological model in which two observed time series of daily proportions of infected and removed ca...
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.
Jeanine Buchanich has been awarded a 3 year $1.2 million contract with the PA Department of Health to evaluate the state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program as part of the CDC’s Overdose Data to Action cooperative agreement. Evaluations will cover the impact of continuing medical education, first responder training, academic detailing, public service announcements and media campaigns, and overdose fatality review, among others.