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Congratulations to professor of biostatistics and health policy William D. Dupont, PhD, FASA, on the publication of Coding Variants of the Genitourinary Development Gene WNT9B Carry High Risk for Prostate Cancer, published January 28 in JCO Precision Oncology in collaboration with Angela Jones (VANTAGE), Jeffrey R. Smith (Department of Medicine), and the VA Million Veteran Program. Dr. Dupont and Dr. Smith are also affiliated with the Medical Research Service of the Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, and the study was supported by grants from the Veterans Health Administration, the V Foundation for Cancer Research, and the National Institutes of Health, with data drawn from the NIH's All of Us program, the Nashville Familial Prostate Cancer Study (NFPCS), the International Consortium for Prostate Cancer Genetics (ICPCG), UK Biobank, and FinnGen. 

The goal of the study was to detect and confirm potential links between specific genes and hereditary prostate cancer. Dr. Dupont and his colleagues used genome-wide single-allele and identity-by-descent analytic approaches to identify pathogenic variants (i.e., mutations) that prostate cancer patients might have in common, and then attempted to replicate their observations with data from the biobanks listed above, confirming the association of two genes — HOXB13 and WNT9B — with high risk of prostate cancer. The paper is the first to discuss WNT9B as a factor in the transmission of prostate cancer. Both genes are vital to prostate development, which suggests that other genes with that characteristic may likewise elevate an individual's risk of developing genitourinary cancer. This new knowledge can help biomedical researchers develop ways to prevent and treat this type of cancer.

Congratulations to PhD candidate Huiding “Eric” Chen on the selection of “Synthetic Sampling Weights for Volunteer-Based National Biobanks: A Case Study with the All of Us Research Program” as one of five winning papers in the 2025 Student Paper Competition sponsored by American Statistical Association’s Consortium of Sections. The consortium consists of the ASA’s Government Statistics Section, Survey Research Methods Section, and Social Statistics Section. Papers entered  the competition had to involve either a new statistical methodology or creative application of statistical analyses to a problem, issue, or policy question pertinent to the consortium’s subject areas.

As the author of a top student paper, Chen will receive a $1,000 stipend and present his work this August at a topic-contributed session during the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings. One of the largest statistical events in the world, JSM is expected to draw more than five thousand attendees from over fifty countries to Nashville. Alumna Christina Tripp Saunders (PhD 2018), now a statistical scientist at Berry Consultants, was a winner of the GSS/SRMS/SSS competition in 2018.

Chen earned his Bachelor of Natural Science degree in statistics at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China), a top Chinese educational institution, followed by his master’s degree in biostatistics at Georgetown University. His dissertation advisor is Qingxia “Cindy” Chen, professor of biostatistics, biomedical informatics, and ophthalmology & visual sciences, and contact PI for the NIH-funded DARSaW project (Developing, Assessing, and Refining Synthetic Sampling Weights to Improve Generalizability of the All of Us Research Program Data). Huiding Chen has served as a data and quantitative analyst for All of Us since 2022, developing novel statistical methods to improve the weighting methods for non-probability sampling cohorts and leveraging Big Microdata from national surveys (e.g., PUMS, NHIS, NHANES) for calibration. His publications include “Evaluation of inpatient medication guidance from an artificial intelligence chatbot” in American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy (2023).