Daniela Witten's latest column for the IMS Bulletin focuses on important issues related to gender in the field of statistics in general, and within IMS in particular.

Replacing all of the oldest school buses in the nation could lead to 1.3 million fewer daily absences annually, according to a University of Michigan study. Adam Szpiro, associate professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington was a co-author on the study.

Yates Coley, PhD, UW faculty member and associate investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI), recently received an Emerging Leader Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.

Investigators commonly find mixtures of DNA in a single forensic sample that contain various unequal contributions, like the DNA samples that could come from multiple people using one knife. Now, the development of technologies can reveal and identify smaller, previously undetectable amounts of DNA samples within the mixture, which enables more specific DNA identification. Faculty member Bruce Weir is interviewed.

Models for suicide preventions that are easier to explain and use could have better uptake in health care settings. UW Biostatistics Affiliate Faculty Susan Shortreed was lead author on this recent study which compares the performance of 5 different models developed to identify a patient's risk of suicidal behavior.

Mosaic and consensus HIV-1 immunogen vaccines were tested in a clinical trial led by a team of researchers including Drs. Kristen Cohen, Andrew Fiore-Gartland, Peter Gilbert and M. Juliana McElrath from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division. Their findings were published recently in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Ali Shojaie will be a member of new multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team that recently received a five-year, $4.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop neural stimulation techniques guided by artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning methods.

Only a handful of scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have been around longer than the institution itself; longtime public health researcher Ross Prentice, PhD, who retired at the end of 2022, is one of them.