By Erin Jester
Students and faculty members in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions Department of Biostatistics traveled to Boston in August to present research and exchange ideas at the American Statistical Association’s Joint Statistical Meetings, the largest gathering of statisticians in North America.
Zitian Wu, a biostatistics Ph.D. student, gave a presentation at the conference. In December 2025, Wu won the ASA Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics Distinguished Student Paper Award for “Sparse Reduced-rank Regression Methods for Spatially Misaligned Data with Application to Spatial Transcriptomics,” co-authored with biostatistics faculty members Susmita Datta, Ph.D., and Arkaprava Roy, Ph.D.
Wu was one of five recipients of the SSGG Student Paper Award, recognizing methodological innovation and/or novel applications of statistical and computational methods in genetics and genomics, and presented the paper as part of the award.
“Presenting my work at such a large gathering of statisticians was both exciting and rewarding, especially having the opportunity to discuss my research with people from different areas of statistics and hear their perspectives,” Wu said.
Wu, Datta and Roy’s research develops statistical tools to better understand how gene activity in brain cells relates to biological changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease; specifically, how gene activity in cells near amyloid plaques — abnormal protein deposits linked to the disease — is associated with plaque size, and how these relationships may differ across cell types and stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
“This award is meaningful to us because it recognizes the importance of developing rigorous, interpretable statistical methods for complex spatial genomics data and encourages continued work translating high-dimensional measurements into scientific insight,” Wu said.
Other conference participants were:
- Wenhan Bao, a Ph.D. student, presented “MintCNA: A Unified Framework for Integrative Copy Number Profiling with Single-Cell Multi-Omics Data.”
- Heng Ge, a Ph.D. student, presented “Neural Tangent Kernels for Complex Genetic Risk Prediction: Bridging Deep Learning and Kernel Method.” The work was co-authored by Qing Lu, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and co-director of the Center for Genetic Epidemiology and Bioinformatics.
- Jonathan Fischer, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor, presented “Analysis of Performance Variability among Major League Baseball Players Using Statcast Data.”
- John Kairalla, Ph.D., a research professor and associate program director of the Children’s Oncology Group, was a non-attending co-author on “Bias in Using Outcomes of Phase III Clinical Trials with Late Randomization as Historical Controls.”
- Tuo Lin, Ph.D., a research assistant professor, presented “Semiparametric Regression Models for Explanatory Variables with Missing Data Due to Detection Limit.”