The Department of Biostatistics congratulates Professor Victor DeGruttola (SD ’86) as this year’s recipient of the 2015 Lagakos Distinguished Alumni Award, in recognition of his leadership in HIV/AIDS research, his achievements and innovation in statistical methodology, and his leadership and service to the Department. Victor will receive the award and present a lecture on, “Responding to Epidemics: Numbers and Personalities.”
Victor served as Director of the statistical coordinating center for the adult project of the AIDS Clinical Trials group from 1996-2003 and as Department Chair from 2009-2015. His current research focuses on working with colleagues across quantitative subdisciplines, such as network science, causal inference, and methods for phylogenetic analyses, to advance the HIV prevention research agenda.
Doctoral student Joey Antonelli won a 2015 ENAR student paper award for his paper “Mitigating Bias in Generalized Linear Mixed Models: The Case for Bayesian Nonparametrics”, written jointly with Associate Professor Sebastien Haneuse and Assistant Professor Lorenza Trippa.
Doctoral Student Shelley Liu received an NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) fellowship to conduct research at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia this summer. Shelley is working with Matt Wand, Distinguished Professor of Statistics and former faculty member in the Department, to develop variational Bayes computational methods for kernel machine regression models.