A collaborative research group led by the University of Pittsburgh will receive the inaugural ENAR Team Science Award in Biostatistics at the 2026 Spring Meeting in March, recognizing their work integrating advanced biostatistics and machine learning with clinical and biomedical research to advance understanding of childhood asthma and pediatric scleroderma.
The distinguished team includes Wei Chen, Juan C. Celedón, Molin Yue, Erick Forno, Kathryn S. Torok and Zhao Ren.
About the Award
The ENAR Team Science Award is a newly established honor, created to recognize collaborative groups whose collective efforts have advanced scientific knowledge through innovative application of biostatistics. Dr. George Tseng, Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Biostatistics & Health Data Science at the University of Pittsburgh nominated the group for this award. The award specifically highlights interdisciplinary teams that exemplify the power of collaboration in addressing complex scientific and societal challenges while emphasizing the essential contribution of biostatistics to the research process.
According to ENAR, the award recognizes teams demonstrating collaborative innovation, significant scientific impact, leadership in promoting team science, and capacity building through mentoring and training of junior researchers. The inaugural award was presented at the ENAR 2025 Spring Meeting Presidential Invited Address, Recognition and Awards Ceremony.
George Tseng, professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science nominated the group for this award.
The Impact of Collaborative Excellence
The team was honored for exceptional integration of advanced biostatistics and machine learning methods with clinical and biomedical expertise to drive breakthroughs in childhood asthma and scleroderma, for impactful innovations in multi-omics, spatial transcriptomics, and disease endotyping, and for highlighting the central leadership role of biostatisticians in transforming biomedical discovery and precision medicine.
Over a decade of sustained collaboration, this interdisciplinary team has generated more than 70 high-impact publications, with half first-authored by biostatistics trainees. Their work has pioneered statistical and machine-learning frameworks that serve as the analytic backbone for major NIH- and DoD-funded programs in childhood asthma and pediatric scleroderma.
Their computational innovations include deep-learning fusion networks, deconvolution pipelines, multi-modal prediction frameworks, and novel approaches for transcriptomic network analysis. These methodological advances ensure rigor and reproducibility while driving discoveries that translate directly to patient care and precision medicine.
About the Team
Wei Chen is professor of pediatrics and founding director of the Statistical Genetics Core, UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Chen has established himself as a nationally recognized biostatistician and computational biologist specializing in bulk and single-cell multi-omics, spatial transcriptomics, and pulmonary medicine. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science at Pitt Public Health. His work has resulted in 190 publications, including senior-author papers in premier journals spanning both statistical methodology and biomedical science. As an elected fellow of the American Thoracic Society, he will serve as president of the Chinese-American Lung Association in 2026.
Juan C. Celedón is professor of pediatrics, medicine, epidemiology and human genetics, and brings internationally recognized expertise in asthma genetics, environmental epidemiology, and health disparities and is a member of the Pediatric Pulmonology Department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). A former president of the American Thoracic Society and elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, he has generated the largest nasal multi-omics datasets in pediatric asthma, leading to breakthrough publications in leading medical journals.
Molin Yue is a recent PhD graduate from the School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Sciences and is currently a research advisor in statistics for Eli Lilly and Company. He represents the exceptional early-career scientists emerging from the team's collaborative training environment. He is first author of a landmark 2025 study in JAMA demonstrating nasal transcriptomic endotypes of childhood asthma and has received multiple awards from the American Thoracic Society and Pitt Public Health.
Kathryn Torok is associate professor of pediatrics and directs the Pediatric Systemic Scleroderma Center at UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and is a nationally recognized leader in juvenile scleroderma. Her partnership with Dr. Chen has pioneered multi-omic, single-cell, and spatial analyses in pediatric scleroderma, generating the first and largest spatial transcriptomics atlas of the skin.
Zhao Ren is associate professor of statistics and serves as associate editor for multiple leading statistics journals and contributes essential quantitative depth through his expertise in high-dimensional inference, graphical models, and statistical genomics. His collaborative work has led to influential publications in computational biology and applied genomics.
Erick Forno is professor of pediatrics and vice chair for clinical research at Indiana University School of Medicine and a leading pediatric pulmonologist, who bridges clinical care and molecular epidemiology, with particular expertise in asthma, obesity-related lung disease, and epigenetics. He has co-invented two U.S. patents with Chen related to mobile health technologies for lung function monitoring.
-Calvin Dziewulski