First-authored paper in JAMIA by Andrew Guide
Congratulations to senior biostatistician Andrew Guide on first-authorship of "Balancing efficacy and computational burden: weighted mean, multiple imputation, and inverse probability weighting methods for item non-response in reliable scales," an article published in JAMIA: A Scholarly Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine on August 13. Co-authors include assistant in biostatistics Shawn Garbett, senior biostatistician Xiaoke (Sarah) Feng, and professor Qingxia (Cindy) Chen, who is the paper's corresponding author, with colleagues in VICTR, DBMI, and Ohio State's Department of Internal Medicine. The study examined ways of interpreting non-responses to the Physical Activity Neighborhood Environment Scale (PANES) in the All of Us Social Determinants of Health survey and to what degree computationally intensive approaches are advisable. In the words of Guide and his co-authors, their goal is "to inform researchers on considerations for handling incomplete data in participant surveys, utilize the data received as efficiently and accurately as possible, and better understand how to use surveys with missingness to conduct accurate research." Guide, Garbett, Chen, and some other team members published another paper on interpreting All of Us data earlier this year; Guide, Garbett, and Feng also served as teaching asistants in this year's Summer Institute short course on the All of Us research program.
Figure 1 in Guide et al., "Balancing efficacy..." For the full caption, view the figure at its journal page or within the full paper.
First-authored paper in Nature Communications by Jia Li
Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Jia Li, professor and chair Yu Shyr, and professor Qi Liu on the August 22 publication of Identification and multimodal characterization of a specialized epithelial cell type associated with Crohn’s disease (CD) in Nature Communications. Dr. Li is first author of the paper and Dr. Liu its corresponding author. The team's study of terminal ileum and ascending colon (LND) cells in CD patients has led to findings that "suggest a potential pathogenic role" for such cells in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Figure 1 from the paper. Visit it at the publication site for the full caption.
Scholars from National Cheng Kung University join our department
We are delighted to welcome two Taiwanese scholars to our department as visiting researchers: student Jo-Ying Hung and professor Kuo-Jung Lee, both based at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), a public research institution in Tainan.
Jo-Ying Hung is a PhD candidate in statistics at NCKU, where she previously earned her BBA and MS degrees. She is formally a visiting student observer who is working with professor Yu Shyr from August 1, 2024, through February 28, 2025, to explore meta-regression techniques for analyzing estimated odds rations and hazard ratios in clinical research and learn about developing, using, and improving advanced statistical methods, tools, and repositories for biomedical research with attention to RNA sequencing, omics, and other key areas of investigation. She has co-authored peer-reviewed papers published in Cardiovascular Diabetology, American Journal of Occupational Therapy, World Neurosurgery, and Scientific Reports, and won an Outstanding Doctoral Student Scholarship at NCKU.
Kuo-Jung Lee is director of the Institutional Research Division at NCKU, as well as a professor in its Department of Statistics and Institute of Data Science. His sabbatical in Nashville is made possible in part by a Senior Fulbright Research Grant. He earned his PhD in statistics at the University of Minnesota, won NCKU's Excellent Teacher Award in 2020, and was most recently first author of papers appearing in Statistics in Medicine and Nanomaterials (Basel). During his visiting scholar appointment, which runs through July 31, 2025, Dr. Lee will work on "Bayesian Feature Selection and Spatio-Temporal Joint Modeling to the Integration of Radiomics and Multiplatform Genomic Data."
Margaret Cullum promoted to program manager
We are pleased to announce the promotion of Margaret Cullum to program manager, in effect as of August 1. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, with a bachelor's degree in journalism and internships at POPSUGAR and Giadzy, Cullum joined the department in 2023 and has provided crucial administrative support for special events (including ICSA 2024 and our 20th anniversary festivities), seminars and short courses (including the CQS Summer Institutes, last October's ASA traveling course, MSCI 5044, and other offerings), the summer internship program for underrepresented undergraduates, the Bellevue Community Food Bank drive, and more. She's also heavily involved with website and bulletin board maintenance, social media updates, and other promotional endeavors, including the coordination of department-branded clothing and swag.
First-authored paper in Genome Biology by Jia Li
Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Jia Li on the publication of "aKNNO: single-cell and spatial transcriptomics clustering with an optimized adaptive k-nearest neighbor graph" in Genome Biology on August 1, with professors Yu Shyr and Qi Liu as corresponding authors. The paper offers a new method "to simultaneously identify abundant and rare cell types based on an adaptive k-nearest neighbor graph with optimization," doing so "more accurately than general and specialized methods." {aKKNO} and related tutorials are free and available on GitHub and Zenodo.
Figure 1 in the paper provides an overview of how aKNNO works.