The Department of Statistics is proud to announce that PhD student Young Joo Lee has been selected as one of the winners of the 2025 Korean International Statistical Society (KISS) Outstanding Student Paper Award. This biennial honor recognizes exceptional student research presented at the KISS Annual Meeting, held during the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM).
Lee’s award-winning paper, titled “RESCUE: computational negative selection for spatial transcriptomics data via robust sparse recovery,” introduces a novel statistical framework for analyzing single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data. His research provides new methods for robustly recovering residual transcriptomes and estimating cell-type proportions, offering insights into complex biological systems such as honey bee brain and human breast cancer tissue.
Among this year’s awardees, Lee’s paper was recognized as the best overall, and he was invited to give a special presentation during the 2025 KISS Outstanding Student Paper Award Presentation on June 25, 2025. His talk, “A robust sparse recovery framework for integrative analysis of single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data,” highlighted the interdisciplinary nature of his work and its impact on advancing computational biology and statistical genomics.
Lee expressed his gratitude to his advisor, Dr. Sihai Dave Zhao, for his guidance and support, as well as to his collaborators from the Han Lab (led by Dr. Hee-Sun Han) and the Robinson Lab (led by Dr. Gene E. Robinson) at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.
More details about the presentation can be found on the KISS website: KISS Outstanding Student Paper Award Presentation.