John “Jack” Leary and Zhaohan Zhu, Ph.D. students in the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions Department of Biostatistics, earned awards for their research presentations at the American Statistical Association Florida chapter annual meeting held at the University of Central Florida February 7 and 8.
“The speakers were quite interesting and I learned a lot,” Leary said. “One thing I really appreciated was the diversity of both topics presented and the speakers themselves, with attendees coming from all over Florida.”
Leary received a student presentation award for his oral presentation, “Identifying Variable Genes in Single Cell and Spatial Sequencing Data via Bayesian Inference.” His presentation discussed the development of two new highly accurate and scalable models for identifying variable genes in datasets. In testing, the models outperformed current state-of-the-art techniques.
Zhu received the student competition award for his poster, “Identifying Gene-Treatment Interactions in CRISPR Screens.” Zhu’s poster describes the development and testing of a two-step method to overcome incomplete CRISPR gene editing data and disentangle the therapy’s effect on specific genes.
Ji-Hyun Lee, DrPH, a UF professor of biostatistics and associate director for Cancer Quantitative Sciences at the UF Health Cancer Center, was the meeting’s plenary speaker. She is currently serving a term as the president of the American Statistical Association, the largest professional group for statisticians and data scientists in the world.