Holly Janes (MS '02, PhD '05) has been named the Prentice Endowed Professor for 2021-22. An affiliate professor of biostatistics, Janes is also co-principal investigator of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) Statistics and Data Management Center at Fred Hutch. Last year, HVTN pivoted from HIV vaccine research to focus its expertise on the COVID-19 vaccine effort.

The University of Washington Department of Biostatistics is celebrating a major milestone as it graduated the first students from its Master of Science Capstone program this past Winter quarter.

Different races have been found to react differently to certain medical treatments, in part based on an individual’s genetic ancestry. Those genetic health risks are being studied by Dr. Timothy Thornton, a professor, the associate chair of education, and the graduate program director in the department of biostatistics at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

“The WHI has been remarkably productive in pursuing a broad range of scientific questions important to women,” said Garnet Anderson (PhD ’89) director of the Hutch's Public Health Sciences division and principal investigator of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) clinical coordinating center. Anderson is also an affiliate professor of biostatistics with the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine that they “do not believe that ignoring race will reduce health disparities” but rather that “such an approach is a form of naive ‘color blindness’ that is more likely to perpetuate and potentially exacerbate disparities,” five Black geneticists set out to explain the pitfalls of leaving race out of medicine. UW news reached out to co-author Timothy Thornton from Biostatistics to learn more.