“During this, our third biannual CANSSI Ontario Research Day, we’ll be celebrating and welcoming new faculty to our statistical sciences community,” said Lisa Strug, director of CANSSI Ontario, in welcoming attendees to the spring gathering.
“We’ll hear about the research that these new faculty are engaged in — and by coming together today, we’ll have many opportunities to build a stronger and more connected community.”
Strug is also director of U of T’s Data Sciences Institute; a senior scientist in the Genetics & Genome Biology program at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children; associate director of the Centre for Applied Genomics; and a professor of statistical sciences in the Department of Statistical Sciences and of biostatistics at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
CANSSI Ontario is the Ontario regional centre of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute. It was established in 2019 to strengthen and enhance research and training in statistical sciences through programs promoting interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research and collaboration — and through events such as this Research Day.
The day featured a full agenda of talks from 11 of CANSSI’s 12 partner universities in Ontario in the areas of statistical methodology, applied statistics and biostatistics. The event’s themes reflected the multidisciplinary nature of statistical sciences: financial, actuarial and data sciences, big data, health data, and statistics theory.
It was exciting to see the breadth of the research and especially nice to be back in person and talk with other faculty and graduate students about potential research collaborations across Ontario.
Presentation topics included: modelling data related to Duchenne muscular dystrophy; investigating changes in the timing of Ontario's wildland fire season; integrating statistics and machine learning to accelerate science.
A highlight of the event was the Distinguished Lecture Series in Statistical Sciences presented by Professor Susan Holmes from the Department of Statistics at Stanford University. Holmes — whose research group developed the popular bioconductor packages phyloseq and dada2 for microbiome data analyses — spoke about her work in immunology, cancer biology and microbial ecology.
During a poster session, 20 trainees from different universities spoke about their research with attendees.
U of T PhD candidate Yuan Tian shared the research she’s been conducting with the supervision of Professor Jun Young Park. Tian’s work tested which brain modality — structural, functional and diffusion MRI — causes Alzheimer’s Disease.
Other student research projects featured during the poster session looked at the positive genetic effects of active music engagement on mental health resilience; the genome of the naked mole rat and what it reveals about their physiology; the relationship between gut microbes and childhood asthma and other diseases related to the immune system; and much more.
“The CANSSI Ontario Research Day 2024 provided early-career researchers in statistics an opportunity to present their work and network with the statistics community from across Ontario,” says Rohan Alexander, CANSSI Ontario’s assistant director, and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information (iSchool) and Department of Statistical Sciences.
“It was exciting to see the breadth of the research and especially nice to be back in person and talk with other faculty and graduate students about potential research collaborations across Ontario.”