Sara Venkatraman, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science, recently won the International Indian Statistical Association’s Student Paper Competition for her paper, “An Empirical Bayes Approach to Estimating Dynamic Models of Co-regulated Gene Expression.”
This award is based on both the submitted paper and a talk at the 2021 IISA Conference, which took place virtually May 20-23. Out of 17 original submissions, two winners were selected from five finalists.
The co-authors on Sara’s paper are her advisors, Sumanta Basu, assistant professor in statistics and data science, and Martin Wells, department chair and Charles A. Alexander professor of statistical sciences; Andrew Clark, professor of molecular biology and genetics; Dr. Sofie Delbare, postdoctoral researcher in statistics and data science, and Myung-Hee Lee, assistant professor of statistics in clinical epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medical College.
“Each co-author on this work provided helpful insights during all phases of the project’s development, from formulating the statistical methods and theory to applying it to real data," she said. "Thanks very much in particular to professors Wells and Basu for the opportunity to work on the project in the first place, and for their guidance in writing my first paper and preparing my presentation.”
Sara also presented this work at the SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems in May and will present at future venues this year, including the ASA's Symposium on Data Science and Statistics this month, the World Meeting for the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, also this month, and the Joint Statistical Meetings in August.