Natalie Gasca, a fifth-year PhD student in biostatistics at the University of Washington received first place honors at the 2019 WNAR student paper competition last week for her Outstanding Oral Presentation. Gasca shared first place honors with two other students.
Gasca presented her paper titled, “Using dimension-reduction methods to identify interpretable diet patterns related to body mass index (BMI) in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA)."
Gasca's research identifies understandable food patterns that are related to heart disease prevention, applying statistical methods that have rarely been used in this area of nutritional science and extending these supervised techniques to better study the relationship between diet and heart disease.
WNAR is the Western North American Region (WNAR) of The International Biometric Society, an international professional and academic society promoting the development and application of statistical and mathematical theory and methods in the biosciences. WNAR sponsors an annual student paper competition as part of their annual scientific conference.
