Data Science careers are in high demand, with many job opportunities and attractive salaries. As a relatively new career, it is ambiguously defined, and the job description of a data scientist can vary greatly from company to company. For those reasons, Data Science has attracted both new grads and career changers from all sorts of different fields. For Statisticians, Data Science is an exciting opportunity to apply your hard-earned skills to a variety of interesting and challenging problems. Having a solid Statistics background will give you a head start in that direction.

In this presentation, an innovative combination of the spatial Poisson process and the complex system will be explored and discussed. In real research, the spatial Poisson process is usually used to compute the benchmark statistics compared to some unknown process. However, it reveals much greater potential in fields such as forestry and epidemiology when incorporated into COBWEB, a piece of agent-based simulation software that effectively replicates a system and predicts the interactions between the system components.

The workforce is collecting and analyzing more data every day, causing a great need to ensure a future workforce has proper data analysis skills. With research showing students’ attitudes toward statistics are generally negative while simultaneously being important predictors of student success in statistics, there is a danger of future generations not having necessary data analysis skills. Measuring students’ attitudes toward statistics is crucial, but current instruments are lacking.

Beyond heredity, there are no known risk factors of pediatric neuroblastoma, yet there are ostensible survival differences by sex. Our work was aimed at identifying and analyzing the genetic basis of these survival differences with methods from statistical genetics, bioinformatics, and epidemiology. Using genomic data from the NCI’s TARGET (Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments) database, we’ve identified 245 genes and 7 protein-coding genes which are differentially expressed between males and females with neuroblastoma.

Primary Biliary Cirrhosis is a chronic liver disease relatively rare and mainly affects women. There are different ways to investigate the association between a biomarker and survival. Some consider only the value at baseline while others take into account the longitudinal trajectory of biomarker. Our goal is to compare three different approaches to assess the association between serum bilirubin and overall survival in PBC patients.

For many years, humans have been striving to understand genetic causes of diseases. Unfortunately, the large majority of genetic studies have largely focused on populations of Europeans ancestry; populations with a more diverse genetic ancestry such as Hispanics/Latinos and African ancestries are largely underrepresented. Admixture mapping is a powerful tool for uncovering the relationship between one’s disease status and genetics in populations with mixed ancestry.

The primary source of atmospheric carbon monoxide (CO) in the Southern Hemisphere is large burn events. This makes a useful proxy for fires since CO is continuously measured by satellites. Fires, in turn, are influenced by the state of the atmosphere and oceans, which is captured in so-called climate indices. Therefore, predictive CO models can help countries prepare for unusually extreme fire seasons.