The Department proudly congratulates PhD students Laura Bumbulis and Tianyi Pan for receiving the Student Research Presentation Award in Biostatistics at the 2025 Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) annual meeting. These awards recognize graduate students who demonstrate excellence in both the conduct and communication of impactful research. This year, both Biostatistics awards went to University of Waterloo students, an exceptional achievement that highlights the strength and innovation of our graduate research community.
Laura Bumbulis’s research addresses a common challenge in longitudinal studies in which comprehensive data are only available for a limited period of time while less comprehensive data are available for an extension period of data collection. In the context of joint models for time-varying risk factors and failure time outcomes, Laura introduced a novel multistate modeling approach that leverages the extension phase to enhance information on the effect of the time-varying risk factors on the failure time of interest.
Tianyi Pan’s research, supervised by ProfessorsGlen McGee and Alex Stringer, advances statistical methods in environmental health. Adaptive cumulative exposure distributed lag non-linear models (ACE-DLNMs) are key tools for assessing delayed effects of exposures on health outcomes. Tianyi and their supervisors have developed a generalized ACE-DLNM framework incorporating penalized splines, significantly expanding its applicability across a range of response types while improving computationally efficient. Read more about this work on Estimating Associations Between Cumulative Exposure and Health via Generalized Distributed Lag Non-Linear Models using Penalized Splines.
Congratulations once again to both Tianyi and Laura on these outstanding achievements. We look forward to the continued impact of your work in the field of biostatistics.