The American Statistical Association Student Chapter at WSU hosted a department Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition last fall. 3MT is a university-based competition for graduate students to present their research within three minutes to a lay audience with the help of only a single static slide. Several graduate students competed in the competition to challenge themselves to present an elevator pitch of their research. A panel of department judges awarded first place to Rachel Perrier and second place to Jessica Dickson, with Blake Nelson and Ryan Whitehead tying for third place.
In March, Rachel Perrier presented on “Third-degree Analogs to Continued Fractions” and Jessica Dickson presented on “The Overlays of Riordan Arrays” at the College of Arts and Sciences 3MT. Jessica Dickson was awarded first place in the college.
Swarnita Chakraborty participated in the Johnson & Johnson HealthTek Hackathon, and her team took second place. The Hackathon allows students to leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and time series forecasting. It's also an opportunity to hear keynote addresses from Johnson & Johnson business and technology leaders, as well as engage in cutting-edge workshops. Her team used natural language processing (NLP) to extract key information from 'Individual Case Safety Reports' to identify whether there were adverse cases for any mentioned Johnson & Johnson drug. Team members had roughly 48 hours to assemble into teams, get a problem and dataset, and provide a presentation of their findings. More information about the Johnson & Johnson HealthTek Hackathon may be found at bdpa.org/event/jnj-healthtech-hack/.
Discuss, Discourse, Disseminate with Data (D4) is a new joint seminar series with faculty and scientists from WSU and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) that takes place every second and fourth Wednesday. The seminar provides a short synopses of data work and hosts an open discussion to encourage research collaboration. The series will end in mid-June 2022 with a WSU-hosted Data Science Day. Among those featured in the series are Professors Bala Krishnamoorthy, Daryl DeFord, and Xiongzhi Chen. Read more in this WSU Insider article, "WSU and PNNL host joint seminar series to foster research collaboration."
Daryl DeFord gave the fall 2021 WSU School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs (PPA) research colloquium talk.
Dean Johnson co-edited a special issue of Stat, the International Statistical Institute (ISI) Journal. Stat is an online, rapid communication research journal that publishes articles in all facets of statistics and related interdisciplinary areas. The special issue welcomed submissions of original works on innovations in statistical collaboration and consulting.
Daryl DeFord's computational redistricting tool, the GerryChain, was used by an independent bipartisan commission that voted to approve a new map for Colorado’s congressional districts, which would divide the state into eight territories with roughly equal populations. The commission relied on the results of the GerryChain, to provide a fair outcome. Read more about this in the University of Colorado Boulder Today article, "Can math make redistricting more fair?"
DeFord’s 2021 summer research team received funding through the UW Data Science for Social Good Program. The team created a resource guide to help nonpartisan groups evaluate the fairness of proposed redistricting maps. Read about their work in the University of Washington's eScience Institute article, "Data Science for Social Good Team Builds Tools to Support Fairness in Computational Redistricting."
Will Hall received a four-year $1.12 million dollar NSF grant with colleagues from the College of Education. The grant will help WSU recruit and retain preservice secondary mathematics teachers. Read more in this WSU Insider article, "New NSF grant to increase math teacher diversity."
Finance and Budget Manager Debbie Brudie, Associate Professor Jave Pascual, and Scholarly Associate Professor Kimberly Vincent retired spring 2022.
