By Erin Jester
Peihua Qiu, Ph.D., dean’s professor and founding chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions, traveled to Washington, D.C., in June to deliver the opening plenary lecture at the 9th International Workshop on Sequential Methodologies, hosted by American University.
The workshop brought together 170 researchers and students from 14 countries and 31 U.S. states to explore the latest advancements in sequential statistics, an approach in which data is evaluated as it is collected, as opposed to setting a fixed sample size in advance.
In his lecture, titled “Recent Advances in Statistical Process Control for Dynamic Disease Screening and Spatio-Temporal Disease Surveillance,” Qiu presented an overview of the sequential methodologies developed by his research team over the past decade for dynamic disease screening and spatiotemporal disease surveillance.
“Disease screening and disease surveillance are inherently sequential decision-making problems because decisions about an individual’s disease status or the occurrence of a disease outbreak are typically made each time a new batch of data becomes available,” Qiu said.
Most existing research treats these problems as fixed-sample size problems, often overlooking their sequential nature, he said, and the resulting methods can be less effective. At the same time, conventional sequential methods can be difficult to apply to complex data structures — the impetus for Qiu and his research team to develop new concepts and methodologies for dynamic disease screening and spatiotemporal disease surveillance.
Qiu has also made substantial contributions to the fields of jump regression analysis, image processing, statistical process control and survival analysis. He has published three books and more than 185 peer-reviewed journal articles in these areas.
In 2023, Qiu was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the highest honors granted to scientists. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Society for Quality and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served as associate editor for a number of top statistical journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association and Biometrics, and as the editor of the flagship statistical journal Technometrics. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field, the American Society for Quality awarded him the prestigious Shewhart Medal in 2024.