Current MS in Statistics student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ruixuan (Rachel) Zhou, has been selected as one of the recipients of the 2018 ASA Section of Statistics in Genomics and Genetics (SGG) Distinguished Student Paper Awards. This award is given out annually to only three to six eligible recipients who are current undergraduate or graduate students at any level as well as be SGG section members with the American Statistical Association (ASA).

Rachel’s paper was a joint effort with Professor Dave Zhao of Statistics, a recent recipient of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ LEAP Scholars award for outstanding teaching and research development. The research and paper, entitled “Estimation and inference for the indirect effect in high-dimensional linear mediation models”, was supported in part by the Mayo Clinic-UIUC Alliance, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NGIMS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative.  

Papers considered in this competition should contain methodological innovations and/or novel applications of statistical and computational methods to problems arising in genetics and genomics. Winners are invited to attend this year’s Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM), which will be held in Vancouver, Canada from July 28 – August 2. Awardees will receive receive $500 and a winning certificate which will be presented at the SGG Business Meeting held during JSM.

Ruixuan (Rachel) Zhou will graduate from the MS: Statistics program in May 2018 and then continue her education at UIUC as she has been accepted to the Statistics PhD program effective Fall 2018.

Please click the link for more information on the ASA Section of Statistics in Genomics and Genetics.