Yuhang Zhou, a Ph.D. student in biostatistics at the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions, took home a poster presentation award from the annual meeting of the Florida chapter of the American Statistical Association, held March 6-7 at Florida International University.
Zhou’s poster, “Transparent Sequential Learning and Monitoring of Spatio-Temporal Disease Incidence Rates,” described the development of a novel disease surveillance method, ST–TSL. This method tracks disease outbreaks across time and location with the ability for recursive updates as new data become available, helping it stay accurate under both normal and unusual conditions while capturing complex patterns in how diseases spread. A case study of the method successfully identified a prominent spike in flu-like illness in late 2019, outperforming other existing methods.
Zhou’s mentor is Peihua Qiu, Ph.D., a dean’s professor and chair of the Department of Biostatistics.
Ji-Hyun Lee, DrPH, a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and associate director for Cancer Quantitative Sciences at the UF Health Cancer Institute, presented the meeting’s ASA Representative Address. She is the immediate past president of the American Statistical Association.