As Chair of the ASA Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics, I am pleased to announce the 2025 Distinguished Student Paper Award Competition. 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. Three to six awards will be given.

Applicants for the SGG Student Paper Award must meet all of the following criteria at the time of submission:

• Be a current undergraduate or graduate student at any level, or have received their degree in statistics, biostatistics, or related quantitative field in 2024.
• Be a current member of SSGG. The applicant can join SSGG at the time of submission. Instructions on how to join are provided below. Note that ASA membership does not automatically confer SSGG membership; ASA members must join individual sections in addition to generic membership.
• Be first author of the paper and scheduled to present the same paper submitted for the award at the 2025 Joint Statistical Meeting (currently scheduled to be held in Nashville, Tennessee) as either a talk, SPEED, or poster.
• Have submitted the paper to no more than one other ASA section 2025 student or early-stage investigator competition. Note that in the event a paper wins two awards, the author may only accept one of the two awards.
• Have not previously won an SSGG student paper award.

Applications should include:

1. A cover letter including name, current affiliation and status including actual or intended date of graduation, and contact information (address, telephone, e-mail) of the applicant;

2. The paper submitted for the competition which should be up to 25 pages (double-spaced, 1-inch margins) including an abstract and references, but not including figures and tables. Figures and tables should be placed at the end of the manuscript. No supplemental materials and appendices beyond the 25-page limit will be accepted. Papers do not need to be anonymized.

3. A letter from the advisor who should certify student status (or completion of degree within the past year), and in the case of joint first-authorship, should indicate the fraction of the applicant’s contribution to the paper.

All materials must be received by 11:59 PM (Pacific Time) November 15, 2024. Winners will be notified by December 15, 2024. Applications must be submitted by email (as separate PDF files). For further information or to apply, please contact Jing Ma, Chair of the SGG Distinguished Student Paper Award Committee jingma@fredhutch.org with “SSGG Distinguished Student Paper Award” in the subject line.

For section members who are faculty or mentors, we would like to encourage you to become a section member, and please bring this to the attention of your students and encourage them to apply. Section members and friends are welcome to contribute funds towards the endowment for future student awards. Please contact Dr. Nancy Zhang at nzh@wharton.upenn.edu, for directions.

To become a SGG section member, please first become an ASA member by signing up here. If you are already an ASA member, there are two ways you can become an SSGG section member: (1) call the ASA Headquarters at (703) 684-1221 and request the SSGG section be added to your membership or (2) renew your ASA membership online via the ASA member only website and add the “Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics” when you are asked to “verify your Publications, Chapters, and Sections, making any necessary additions or removals.”

I gave a talk to undergraduate interns in the SeattleStatGROWS program on Data to Knowledge: A Personal Journey. This talk features recent work on canine comorbidity networks by a former undergraduate intern Antoinette Fang.

I was recently invited to write about careers in Biostatistics for high school students interested in careers in STEM and healthcare. If you are curious about careers in Biostatistics or cancer research, please check out this article. Huge thanks to Kristen Bergsman who helped write the article!

Jing received an R01 award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for the project on “Statistical Methods for Network-based Integrative Analysis of Microbiome Data”.

This project is in collaboration with Drs. Ali Shojaie, Yue Wang, and Robert Kaplan.

Jing received an award from The Translational Data Science Integrated Research Center for the pilot project on “Systems biology analysis of the immunomodulatory influence of circulating gut microbe-derived metabolites after transplantation”.

This project is in collaboration with Dr. Kate Markey, and will analyze a novel blood sample-derived data set. Collected from patients who underwent allogeneic stem cell transplantation, these samples have already been analyzed using state of the art flow cytometry and metabolomics methods. We now aim to a) develop new understanding of the links between microbial metabolites and immune function, and b) develop novel computational approaches to analyze these types of data sets.