19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

WInter 2015

Dan Solomon Retiring from NC State, Stepping Down as Chair of SAMSI’s Governing Board

Dan Solomon, chair of SAMSI’s governing board, has decided to retire from NC State University this summer. Solomon has been dean of the College of Sciences from 2013 to present, and dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (PAMS) since 2000. He has also decided to step down as chair of the governing board for SAMSI.

Solomon was at NC State for 33 years. He started his fac-ulty career in 1968 at Cornell University, then came to NC State in 1981 as head of the statistics department.

Solomon was one of the key figures in developing the Na-tional Institute of Statistical Sciences, and continues to serve in various capacities on its board of trustees. He was instrumental in starting SAMSI and has remained very active in our organization. He has chaired the governing board since SAMSI began in 2000.

“We owe a depth of gratitude to Dan Solomon for his extraordinary leadership guiding the development and progress of SAMSI,” noted Richard Smith, director of SAMSI. “We will greatly miss his enthusiasm and encouragement that he has given us through the years.”

Solomon is a Fellow of the American Statistical Associa-tion (ASA) serving in many capacities through the years for ASA and was the 2010 winner of its Founders Award. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He was editor of Biometrics, the journal of the International Biometric Society, and a member of its International Council. He is still on the NISS Board of Trustees as its Treasurer.

Volume 6Issue 3

Dan Solomon at the ribbon cutting ceremony in 2008 for the SAMSI wing of the NISS building.

Dan Solomon at the Joint Statistical Meetings in 2012 (left) and (right) with this wife, Carolyn, in 2013

Omics Data Integration Workshop Held at SAMSI

The Omics Data Integration workshop, held February 16-17 at SAMSI, examined the statistical and computational challenges arising from the analysis and interpretation of diverse types of omics data (genomics, proteomics, genetics, etc). This workshop was held as part of the Beyond Bioinformatics workshop.

In particular, two working groups presented their research. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) group is exploring the infer-ence of cancer subtypes, and multidimensional outcome predic-tions through the joint analysis of diverse data types. The Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) working group is ex-ploring the biological problems that include studying multivariate disease phenotypes, using omic data for sub-type identification, in depth exploration of GWAS results and identifying pathways associated with disease.

SAMSI postdoctoral fellow Jyotishka Datta decided not to follow the family tradition and become a doctor. Instead, he decided to follow his other passion, which was mathematics and statistics.

Jyotishka grew up in Kolkata, India. He went to Ramakrish-na Mission Residential College Narendrapur, for his higher secondary education. This was one of the best schools in the region and here he had the opportunity to study with some of the brightest and extremely motivated students. It was then that he decided to pursue a career in a field of research.

Jyotishka went to the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI, Kolkata) for his B.Stat and M.Stat degrees. He developed a strong background in theoretical statistics and was introduced to programming and real-life applications in human genetics. “I had many wonderful teachers there. Not only did they inspire my love for Statistics and Probability, their teaching helped me in many ways on my path to become a researcher and teacher,” he said.

After working with Barclays Bank in Mumbai for a year developing policies and evaluation strategies for customers prior to their acquisition at the bank, Jyotishka came to the U.S. to study at Purdue University for his doctorate in Statistics. Jyo-tishka was studying under the guidance of Jayanta K. Ghosh, who became his thesis advisor at Purdue. They worked on the theoretical aspects of multiple testing and model selection. “One day he showed me this new paper on the Horseshoe prior that had excellent numerical properties and was becoming very popular in the Bayesian community,” said Jyotishka. One aspect that needed to be looked at was the theoretical properties. After about a year, he could prove theorems that this horseshoe prior was asymptoti-cally optimal.

One of the authors of the Horseshoe Prior was Nicholas Polson, professor at Chicago Booth School who visited Purdue in March, 2014 and they talked about these special class of priors. “I was also working on these priors for a different problem with

Anindya Bhadra at Purdue who is also a visitor at SAMSI now. Anindya introduced me to Nick and he proposed this new idea that we can extend the Horseshoe prior to sharpen its ability to extract signals from noise. We named this prior ‘Horseshoe Plus’ prior,” explained Jyotishka.

“It’s been nice to be able to collaborate with Anindya face-to-face at SAMSI,” Jyotishka noted

Currently Jyotishka is working with Duke Statistics profes-sor David Dunson. They are working on Bayesian non-parametric analysis of ‘sparse’ point processes. This is motivated by a variety of application areas, where the interest is in flexible modeling of the intensity of ‘rare’ event realizations.

Jyotishka is also collaborating with Sandeep Dave, Associate Professor, Division of Oncology, at the Duke School of Medicine and they are studying RNA-seq analysis of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). “One of our main objectives is to build a robust supervised classifier to classify subjects into two known subtypes of DLBCL, namely ABC and GCB”.

Jayanta Ghosh, his advisor at Purdue, was the first person to recommend to Jyotishka that he consider coming to SAMSI for a postdoctoral fellowship. And his good friend, Sanvesh Srivastava, who is a SAMSI second year postdoc this year, also told him about the various nice opportunities that this program offers to a postdoc.

When Jyotishka isn’t working at SAMSI, he likes to read books and occasionally write poetry and scripts for theatre. Jyotishka also loves drawing and has a long-cherished dream of writing a graphical novel someday.

Jyotishka married Shalini in 2012. They have a dog, Max, who is a terrier. They love going for long walks with Max and exploring local family-owned restaurants and coffee shops.

From the director…

Postdoctoral Fellow Profile: Jyotishka Datta

SAMSI has many activities upcoming over the next several months.

First there are the remaining workshops of our two current programs, on Bioinformatics and Ecology. The Bioinformatics program has workshops on Epigenetics and the Human Micro-biome, and the Ecology program has a workshop on Multivariate Models in Ecology and then one on Software Carpentry. The latter is concerned with the problems associated with developing large software tools for research and with integrating software products produced by different groups of researchers – a chal-lenge for anyone trying to develop large-scale interdisciplinary projects in the present-day research environment. We are grateful to SAMSI visitor Lea Jenkins for proposing and volunteering to lead this workshop. Both programs will conclude with their Transition Workshops in May.

Then we move into our summer season with two short research programs plus a summer school to introduce the fall Neuroscience program. One of the summer research programs is on Computational Hematology and is concerned with the topics of fluid dynamics, uncertainty quantification and algo-rithmic development, with participation also from physiologists and medical doctors. The other summer program is on Bayesian

Nonparametrics, and will focus on statisti-cal and mathematical theory for inference in high-dimensional spaces, a topic central to the numerous “Big Data” applications of statistical theory.

After that we will move to our 2015/16 year-long research programs, one on Chal-lenges in Computational Neuroscience (CCNS) and the other on Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Forensic Science – both have opening workshops set up for August. CCNS is closely connected with the NIH Brain Research through Advancing In-novative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, which is part of a new Presidential focus aimed at revolutionizing studies of the human brain. The SAMSI program will combine various “top-down” techniques, such as image analysis and machine learning, developing advanced statistical tools for processing neuroscience data, with a parallel “bottom-up” track that is concerned with mathematical models for the dynamic behavior of the complex brain system.

The Forensics program is also motivated by broad na-tional needs – in this case, a series of National Research Council

(Continued on page 4)

Chief Meteorologist Greg Fishel Lec-ture

Directorate:Richard Smith| DirectorThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sujit Ghosh| Deputy DirectorNorth Carolina State University

Ilse Ipsen| Associate DirectorNorth Carolina State University

Nell Sedransk| Associate DirectorNational Institute of Statistical Sciences

Thomas Witelski| Associate DirectorDuke University

SAMSI Staff: Gordon Campbell | Operations Directorcampbell at samsi.info

Rita Fortune | Financial Analystrita at samsi.info

Thomas Gehrmann | Program Assistanttgehrmann at samsi.info

Karem Jackson | Workshop Specialistkjackson at samsi.info

Katherine Kantner | Webmasterkak at niss.org

Sue McDonald | Senior Program Coordinatorsue at samsi.info

Jamie Nunnelly | Communications Directornunnelly at niss.org

Karen Poole | Accounting Technicianpoolek at email.unc.edu

Follow us! @NISSSAMSI

Read our blog at: samsiatrtp.wordpress.com

Students Tour GlaxoSmithKline and Learn about Bio-informatics at SAMSI Undergraduate Workshop

About 25 students from around the United States attended SAMSI’s undergraduate workshop October 23-24. Students got to hear about the exciting field of bioinformatics along with a visit to a local pharmaceutical company.

The workshop opened with welcoming remarks by the Deputy Director of SAMSI Sujit Ghosh followed by introductions of SAMSI staffs and activities. Fred Wright from North Carolina State University (NCSU) talked about genomics and bioinformatics and how the intensity of information is nearly overwhelming, but there are emerging statisti-cal techniques to use and process the flow of data.

Paul Brooks, Virginia Commonwealth University, had a stimulating conversa-tion with the students about several logistics of prepar-ing application packages for graduate school and what kinds of things the Math and Stat departments would be looking for that might give the students a competitive advantage.

In the afternoon after having a sumptuous lunch, the students and some of SAMSI’s staff had a real treat. They trav-eled together to the pharma-ceutical company GlaxoSmith-Kline located only a few blocks from SAMSI to hear about how applied mathematicians and statisticians help with the drug development pipeline. Biologists and chemists rely greatly on the statisticians to help them interpret the results in the clinical trials, for example. Alan Menius and Katja Remlinger of GlaxoSmithKline hosted the students and took them on a tour of some of the labs. One of the participants noted that, “The speakers were down to Earth and the workshop was well set up.” Another students said, “I LOVED the tour. It was awesome to see an industry in which math is applied at a higher level every day.”

Later in the afternoon, a session on “Statistical Evolutionary Biology” was led by the SAMSI postdoc Chris Nasrallah with assistance from SAMSI postdocs Yize Zhao and Jyotishka Datta. The tutorial featured hands-on use of software to analyze evolution-ary data.. And, Shyamal Peddada from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) gave a presentation on geometry in bioinformatics following a brief description of his own career path.

At the final panel session of Day 1, several of the graduate students and postdocs from SAMSI talked about what it’s like to be a graduate student or a postdoc and what students should think about as they begin developing their careers in mathematical sci-ences.

Students enjoyed a great barbeque dinner before returning to the hotel. The next morning’s session started with a recap from Deputy Director Sujit Ghosh

and then Alison Motsinger-Reif from NCSU gave an interesting talk about how bioin-formatics is used in genetics and personalized medicine, which is an emerging field of work.

Jung-Ying Tzeng from NCSU presented the final talk of Day 2 which was “Re-gression Methods for Genomic Data Analysis.” Students left the workshop with a very positive attitude towards pursuing their career with further graduate studies; in fact one of the participants stated in her email to the Deputy Director, “I am very happy with the way you are steering SAMSI and from an undergraduate perspective the workshop was very compelling towards pursuing a graduate degree.”

19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

19 T. W. Alexander DriveP.O. Box 14006Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-4006

For more information about SAMSI programs and workshops, visit SAMSI’s website at http://www.samsi.info

Calendar of Events for SAMSIMultivariate Models in Ecology When: March 2, 2015 - March 4, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

EpigeneticsWhen: March 9, 2015 - March 10, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

Discovering Patterns in Human Microbiome Data (HMD) When: March 16, 2015 - March 18, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

Software Carpentry When: April 13, 2015 - April 17, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

NIMBioS Graduate Workshop on Current Trends in Statistical Ecology When: April 15, 2015 - April 17, 2015 NIMBioS at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Transition Workshop: Ecology ProgramWhen: May 4, 2015 - May 6, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

Transition Workshop: Beyond Bioinformatics Program When: May 11, 2015 - May 13, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

SAMSI-SAVI Workshop on Time Series Analysis When: May 25, 2015 - May 30, 2015 Pune, India.

Uncertainties in Computational Hemodynamics When: June 1, 2015 - June 3, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

Extreme Value AnalysisWhen: June 15, 2015 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Bayesian Nonparametrics: Synergies between Statistics, Probability and MathematicsWhen: June 29-July 2, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

Neuro Summer SchoolWhen: July 27, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

Challenges in Computational Neuroscience Opening Workshop When: August 17-21, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

Forensics Opening WorkshopWhen: August 31-September 4, 2015 Research Triangle Park, NC

reports that have argued the need for better statistical underpin-ning of many of the procedures common in forensics science. Fingerprints, analysis of bullet imprints and many other areas of forensic science raise the need for better techniques to analyze and compare images. The program will feature statistical and mathematical themes such as pattern recognition, treatment of bias, image analysis and quality control, and will take advantage of the proximity of the Forensic Sciences Institute at North Caro-lina State University.

We also have upcoming educational and outreach activities including co-sponsoring a workshop on statistical methods for graduate students in ecology (at the National Institute for Math-ematical and Biological Synthesis, in Tennessee) and our regular Industrial Mathematical and Statistical Modeling workshop for graduate students in July.

If you have not been to SAMSI recently, please look out for the detailed announcements on our webpage and consider paying us a visit sometime soon!

From the Director (Continued)(From page 2)