On December 6, 2024, Ph.D. student Jiadong Fang successfully defended his thesis entitled “Quantile and Expectile Regression with Rare Feature Aggregation.” Jiadong was co-advised by Dr. Kun Chen and Dr. Yuwen Gu, and his committee also included Dr. HaiYing Wang. Thank you all for your support!
After graduation, Jiadong will join Abbvie as a statistician.
Congratulations, Dr. Fang!
Dr. Shane Sacco will join the Department of Medicine at the UConn School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2024. Shane has been with our group for three years as a Postdoc and has made great contributions. He has been doing excellent research, primarily focusing on suicide prevention and mental health research with large-scale medical data.
Congratulations, Shane!
On July 10, 2024, Ph.D. student Jun (Bruce) Jin successfully defended his thesis entitled “On Large-Scale Transfer Learning with Heterogeneous Data.” Bruce’s committee consists of Drs. Robert Aseltine, Kun Chen, and Jun Yan. Thank you all for your support!
After graduation, Bruce will join Henry Ford Health + Michigan State University Health Sciences (https://www.henryfordmsu.org/).
Congratulations, Dr. Jin!
Our project, entitled “Coupling Risk Screening and Predictive Algorithms to Improve the Identification of Patients at Risk for Suicidal Behavior,” has been selected for funding through the 2024 Alan R. Bennett Public Health Policy Research opportunity.
A generous contribution by a CLAS alumnus, Alan Bennett, provides resources for projects in an area of priority for the CLAS Strategic Plan: Public Health Policy Research.
Kun Chen has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Innovative Scholarship Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) at UConn.
Innovative Scholarship Award is awarded in recognition of outstanding achievements in interdisciplinary research that engage novel intersections to address major challenges to knowledge, well-being, and our world. CLAS Annual Awards recognize the extraordinary contributions of faculty and staff and are the highest honor given by the College. The awards are designed to highlight activities that advance the strategic goals and mission of CLAS.
Chen is very honored to receive the award and grateful for the recognition from his peers.
Thrilled to share that the inaugural Pharmaceutical Data Science Conference (phds.nestat.org) at UConn (03/18 – 03/19) was a great success! A journey that took three years from its initial conception to fruition, this conference was spearheaded by elite members from pharmaceutical companies’ data science teams. I’m immensely proud to have collaborated with these incredible partners to bring this vision to life.
This unique conference bridged the entire data science lifecycle within the pharmaceutical sector, touching upon many critical application issues. Both UConn students and I have gained immensely from this experience.
The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, aligning with the vibrant 800-person fireside chat on “Empowering Statistics in the Era of AI” just days prior. The discussions there resonated deeply with the essence of our conference, highlighting the crucial cross-talk and problem-driven training that current statistics education might overlook.
It’s a reminder of the transformative power of data science and the importance of fostering an environment where vital conversations across academia, industry, and government agencies can take place. Looking forward to many more milestones like this!
PhD student Xiaohui Yin won the 2024 ASA Mental Health Statistics Section Student Paper Award based on our work “Salvaging Forbidden Treasure in Medical Data: Utilizing Single-Record Data to Improve Suicide Risk Prediction via Integrative Learning.”
Congratulations, Xiaohui!
On September 27, 2023, Ph.D. student Boyang Tang successfully defended his thesis entitled “Stagewise Majorization-Minimization Algorithms for Regularized Learning with Applications.” Boyang’s committee consists of Drs. Kun Chen, Yuwen Gu and HaiYing Wang. Thank you all for your support!
After graduation, Boyang will join FDA.
Congratulations, Dr. Tang!
Kun Chen is elected as a member of the Board of Directors (2024-2026) of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA). It is truly an honor, and Chen is very grateful for the trust and support of ICSA members.
Join us for the 6th Annual NERDS Workshop, a unique gathering dedicated to addressing the statistical challenges in rare disease drug development. NERDS workshop provides a common platform for knowledge exchange, idea sharing, and networking among statisticians, regulators, and industry experts in the rare disease space.
Website: nerds.nestat.org
Contact: Co-Chairs Kun Chen (kun.chen@uconn.edu) and Richard Zhang (Richard.Zhang@pfizer.com).
