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Research Seminar

Research Seminar

All research seminars will be held in Bexell Hall room 415

Participants must have the Zoom app and the seminar link and password. The login information will be emailed on the morning of the talk. To receive it, please subscribe to our seminar notification mailing list.

  • 3:00 p.m. Tea and refreshments with the faculty and speaker in Weniger 245
  • 4:00 p.m. Seminar in Bexell Hall 415

Seminars are free and open to the public

Research seminar archive

October 3 – Jessica (Jingyi) Li, Department of Statistics, UCLA

Abstract: The rapid development of genomics technologies has propelled fast advances in genomics data science. While new computational algorithms have been continuously developed to address cutting-edge biomedical questions, a critical but largely overlooked aspect is the statistical rigor. In this talk, I will introduce our recent work that aims to enhance statistical rigor by addressing three issues:

  1. Large-scale feature screening (i.e., enrichment and differential analysis of high-throughput data) relying on ill-posed p-values;
  2. Double-dipping (i.e., statistical inference on biasedly altered data);
  3. Gaps between black-box generative models and statistical inference.

October 10 – Luca Mazzucato, Department of Mathematics and Biology, University of Oregon

Abstract: Animal behavior exhibits a striking amount of variability in the temporal domain along at least three independent axes: hierarchical, contextual, and stochastic. First, a vast hierarchy of timescales links movements into behavioral sequences and long-term activities, from milliseconds to minutes. Second, action timing can be modulated by changes in context, of either internal (neuromodulatory, state-dependent) or external origin. Third, self-initiated actions exhibit large residual variability across repetitions, with signatures of stochastic origin. What computational principles underlie such complex temporal features? We will present the foundation of a theory of temporal variability in behavior and neural activity, based on metastable attractors observed in sensory and motor cortical areas. We will highlight the essential role played by intrinsic noise and heterogeneities in controlling the features of temporal variability.


October 17 – Hao Chen, Department of Statistics, UC Davis

Abstract: After observing snapshots of a network, can we tell if there has been a change in dynamics? After collecting spiking activities of thousands of neurons in the brain, how shall we extract meaningful information from the recording? We introduce a change-point analysis framework utilizing graphs representing the similarity among observations. This approach is non-parametric and can be applied to data when an informative similarity measure can be defined. Analytic approximations to the significance of the test statistics are derived to make the method fast applicable to long sequences. The method is illustrated through the analysis of the Neuropixels data.


October 24 – Ali Shojaie, Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington, Seattle

Abstract: Recent evidence suggests that changes in biological networks, e.g., rewiring or disruption of key interactions, may be associated with development of complex diseases. These findings have motivated new research in computational and experimental biology that aim to obtain condition-specific estimates of biological networks, e.g. for normal and tumor samples, and identify differential patterns of connectivity in such networks, known as differential network analysis. In this talk, we primarily focus on testing whether two Gaussian graphical models are the same. We will first illustrate that existing inference procedures for this task may lead to misleading results. To address this shortcoming, we propose a two-step inference framework, for testing the null hypothesis that the edge sets in two networks are the same. The proposed framework is especially appropriate if the goal is to identify nodes or edges that show differential connectivity. Time permitting, we will also discuss how differential network analysis methods can be extended to non-Gaussian settings as well as settings where differences in network edges are functions of other covariates.


October 31 – Dominik Rothenhausler, Department of Statistics, Stanford University


November 7 – Karthika Mohan, EECS Department, Oregon State University


November 14 – Rahul Majumder, Operations Research and Statistics Group, Sloan School of Business, MIT


November 21 – Vijayan Nair, Wells Fargo


November 28 – Ben Brown, Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley, and Computational Biologist, Berkeley Labs

Jan 11th, 4 - 5 p.m. – Katherine McLaughlin, Assistant Professor, Oregon State University, Statistics Dept, Corvallis, OR


Jan 25th, 4 - 5 p.m. – Sharmodeep Bhattacharyya, Assistant Professor, Oregon State University, Statistics Dept, Corvallis, OR


Feb 1st, 4 - 5 p.m. – Jean Opsomer, Vice President & Senior Statistical Fellow, Westat


Feb 8th, 4 - 5 p.m. – Holly Janes, Professor of Vaccine and Infectious Diseases, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center


Feb 15th, 4 - 5 p.m. – Kathi Ivrine, Statistician, U.S. Geological Survey


Feb 22nd, 4 - 5 p.m. – Teri Utlaut, Statistician, Intel Corporation


Mar 1st, 4 - 5 p.m. – John Williamson, Statistician, Center for Disease Control and Prevention

Sep 28th, 4–5 p.m. Orientation, Oregon State University, Statistics Dept


Oct 5th, 1–2 p.m. Tracy Ke, Assistant Professor, Harvard University, Statistics, Dept., Cambridge, MA


Oct 12th, 1–2 p.m. Pixu Shi, Assistant Professor, Duke University, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Durham, NC


Oct 19th, 4–5 p.m. Anru Zhang, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Statistics Dept., Madison, WI


Oct 28th, 1–2 p.m. Scott Bruce, Assistant Professor, George Mason University, Statistics Dept., Fairfax, VA


Nov 2nd, 4–5 p.m. Ali Shojaie, Professor, University of Washington, Statistics Dept Seattle, WA


Nov 9th, 4–5 p.m. Minge Xie, Professor, Rutgers University, Statistics Dept., New Brunswick, NJ


Nov 16th, 1–2 p.m. Hui Jiang, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, Biostatistics, Ann Arbor, MI


Nov 39th, 4–5 p.m. Maude David, Assistant Professor, Oregon State University, Department of Microbiology, Corvallis, OR

  • January 7th – Abel Rodriguez, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics and Associate Dean at Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
  • January 14th – Stephanie Hicks, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
  • January 23rd – Special seminar: Dajiang Liu, Penn State University
  • January 28th – Ramon Durazo, Loyola Chicago University
  • January 29th – Special Seminar: Aluisio Pinheiro, Ph.D., University of Campinas
  • February 4th – Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Oregon State University's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
  • February 11th – Frederick Campbell, Microsoft
  • February 18th – Jane-Ling Wang, University of California, Davis
  • February 25th – Luis Tenorio, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Colorado School of Mines
  • March 4th – Luis Leon-Novelo, Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  • April 8th – Xinping Cui, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Statistics, University of California, Riverside, California
  • April 15th – Ben Shaby, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics and the Institute for CyberScience at Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania
  • April 22nd – Saonli Basu, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Division of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • April 24th – Lucas Beverlin, Ph.D., Statistician at Intel, Corp, Hillsboro, Oregon
  • April 29th – Cindy Yu, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, Center of Survey Statistics and Methodology at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
  • May 6th – Alvaro Munoz, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Methodology at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland
  • May 13th – Jackie Hughes-Oliver, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University, Raleigh,North Carolina
  • May 20th – Daniel Taylor-Rodriguez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Fariborz Maseeh Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
  • September 30 – Orientation, Statistics Department
  • October 7th – Amy Willis, Assistant Professor University of Washington, Biostatistics Department, Seattle, Wa
  • October 14th – Jayanth Banavar, Professor and Knight Chair of Physics University of Oregon, Physics Department, Eugene, Or
  • October 21st – Dongseok Choi, Professor OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, Portland, Or
  • October 28th – Lin Xihong, Professor Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Ma
  • November 4th – Wendy Meiring, Professor UC Santa Barbara, Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, Santa Barbara, Ca
  • November 18th – Mikyoung Jun, Professor Texas A&M University, Department of Statistics, College Station, TX
  • November 25th – Aditya Guntuboyina, Associate Professor University of California, Berkeley, Department of Statistics, Berkeley, CA
  • October 1st – Amelia McNamera, Ph.D., Assistant Professor for Department of Computer and Information Sciences at University of St. Thomas
  • October 8th – Bryon Aragam, Ph.D., Research Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University
  • October 15th – Kathy Li, Assistant Professor of Marketing at McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin
  • October 22nd – Kristen Gore, Ph.D., Hewlett Packard, Inc
  • October 26th, 2018 (Friday) Debashis Paul, Ph.D., Professor for Department of Statistics at University of California, Davis
  • October 29th – Naomi Altman, Ph.D., Professor for Department of Statistics at Penn State
  • November 5th – Andrew Bray, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Reed College
  • January 23, 2017: Dr. Craig Johns, Distinguished Data Scientist, Oracle Title: "Causal Inference in Advertising"
  • January 30, 2017: Dr. Andrew Zhou, Professor, Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington Director of Biostatistics Unit, Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System, Associate Director, National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center (NACC) Title: "Double Robust Estimator of Average Causal Treatment Effect for Censored Medical Cost Data"
  • February 6, 2017: Dr. Hongyuan Cao, Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Missouri Title: "Analysis of asynchronous longitudinal data with partially linear models."
  • February 13, 2017: Wanli Zhang, Department of Statistics, Oregon State University Title: "Model-based Clustering with Measurement or Estimation Errors"
  • February 20, 2017: Tzu-Chin Wu, Oregon State University Career Development Center Title: "Writing an Effective Resume and/or Cover Letter"
  • March 6, 2017: Kristin Luck, Entrepreneur Title: "From Research Assistant to Entrepreneur: Mapping a Data Driven Career Path"
  • March 13, 2017: Jianfei (Jeffrey) Zheng, Department of Statistics, Oregon State University Title: "Semi-parametric method for non-ignorable missing in longitudinal data using refreshment samples."
  • February 8, 2016: Katherine R. McLaughlin, Dept. of Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles, "Modeling Preferential Recruitment for Respondent-Driven Sampling"
  • February 18, 2016: Karl Gregory, Dept. of Statistics, Universität Mannheim, "Pointwise inference in the high-dimensional additive model"
  • February 23, 2016: Dehan Kong, "High-dimensional Matrix Linear Regression Model"
  • April 4, 2016: Lorenzo Ciannelli, Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, "Risk and uncertainty quantification in marine science and policy" (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • April 11, 2016: Dan Dalthorp, PhD, USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, "Estimation of mortality of legally protected bird and bat species at wind power facilities - Statistical inference when stakes are high and evidence is scarce" (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • April 18, 2016: Jun Li, Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics at University of Notre Dame, "Statistical analysis of single-cell RNA-Sequencing data: identifying and removing the cell-cycle effect" (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • April 25, 2016: Lu Wang, PhD candidate, Oregon State University Department of Statistics, "Nonparametric estimation of additive models with shape constraints" (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • May 2, 2016: Nikolay Bliznyuk, Assistant Professor of Statistics, University of Florida, "A Multi-Pathogen Hierarchical Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Model for Transmission of Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease" (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • May 9, 2016: Sujit Ghosh, Professor of Statistics, NC State University and Deputy Director, SAMSI, "Semi-parametric Model Based Methods to Test for Biosimilarity" (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • May 16, 2016: Wei Sun, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, TBA (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • May 23, 2016: John Henry, VP Data Scientist at Maiden Re, TBA (Room 218, Covell Hall)
  • September 26, 2016: Department Orientation
  • October 3, 2016: Department of Statistics Faculty research introduction
  • October 10, 2016: Brian Sikora, Senior Director, Kaiser Permanente Title: Opportunities in Healthcare Analytics
  • October 17, 2016: Donald A. Pierce, Professor Emeritus Statistics, Oregon State University Title: Modern Likelihood - Frequentist Inference
  • October 24, 2016: Andrew Ferlitsch, Sharp Labs of America Title: Blazing a Trail on Collecting War Crime Data in Real Time
  • October 31, 2016: Claudio Fuentes, Department of Statistics, Oregon State University Title: Marginal Likelihood Estimation of Negative Binomial Parameters with Applications to RNA-Seq Data
  • November 7, 2016: Tomi Mori, Professor, Oregon Health Science University Title: Evaluation of Safety in Biomarker Driven Multiple Agent Phase IB Trial
  • November 21, 2016: Jinna Liu, Ecova Title: How Big Data is Impacting Utility Industry
  • November 28, 2016: Xiaohui Chang, Oregon State University Title: Disease Risk Estimation by Combining Case-Control Data with Aggregated Information on the Population at Risk
  • January 5, 2015: Carolyn Killefer, Career Development Center, Oregon State University (Room 102 Owen) "Writing and Effective Resume and Cover Letter"
  • January 26, 2015: Jeremy Gaskins, University of Louisville, KY (Room 102 Owen) "Bayesian Methods for Non-Ignorable Dropout in Joint Models in Smoking Cessation Studies"
  • February 2, 2015: David Degras, DePaul University, IL (Room 102 Owen) "Estimation and detection of brain activations in fMRI studies"
  • February 9, 2015: Juan Restrepo, Oregon State University Department of Mathematics (Room 102 Owen) "Data Assimilation: Non-Gaussian Filtering Strategies for Time Series and Dynamics"
  • **February 20, 2015 (SPECIAL DAY) Sanjay Chaudhuri, National University of Singapore (Room TBA) "Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Bayesian Empirical Likelihood"
  • February 23, 2015: Daniel Taylor, SAMSI (Room 102 Owen)
  • **February 26, 2015 (SPECIAL DAY) Dr. Ernest Fokoue, Associate Professor of Statistics, Rochester Institute of Technology (Room 112 Kearney) "Random Adaptive Subspace Learning for High Dimension Low Sample Size Data"
  • March 2, 2015: Adam Branscum, Oregon State University Biostatistics Department (Room 102 Owen) "Nonparametric Bayesian Applications in Biostatistics"
  • **March 5, 2015 (SPECIAL DAY) Jay VerHoef, (Room 112 Kearney) "Spatial Statistical Models for Stream Networks"
  • March 9, 2015: Frederic Schoenberg, (Room 102 Owen) "Voronoi residuals and other residual analyses applied to CSEP earthquake forecasts"
  • **March 12, 2015 (SPECIAL DAY) Ranjan Maitra, (Room 112 Kearney)
  • March 30, 2015: Michael Waterman, Computational Biology, USC
  • April 6, 2015: Kathy Hall, Senior Statistician, Hewlett Packard, Corvallis (Room 101 Owen Hall), "Clients, Decisions and Statistics: Issues for consulting statisticians"
  • April 13, 2015: Tom Dietterich, Distinguished Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University (Room 200, Gleeson Hall), "Advances in Anomaly Detection"
  • April 20, 2015: Roberto Molinari, Research Center for Statistics, University of Geneva (Room 200, Gleeson Hall), "A Robust Wavelet-based Framework for the Estimation of Time Series Models"
  • **April 24, 2015 (SPECIAL DAY and time = 3:00 pm): Ron Wasserstein, Executive Director, American Statistical Association (Room 102, Owen Hall),
  • May 11, 2015: Ed Waymire, Mathematics,Oregon State University (Room 200, Gleeson Hall), "Revisiting the Hurst Exponent"
  • May 18, 2015: Selena Niu, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Arizona (Room 200, Gleeson Hall), "Reduced Ranked Linear Discriminant Analysis"
  • **May 19, 2015 (SPECIAL DAY and time = 2:00 pm): Roger Zoh, Texas A & M (Room 106 Owen Hall), "Application of a Probabilistic Correlation Analysis to Two Counts Data Sets"
  • June 1, 2015: Jacob Bien, Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, Cornell (Room 200, Gleeson Hall),
  • Oct 5, 2015: Eric Fox, EPA, Corvallis, "Nonparametric Methods for Estimating Space-time Hawkes Point Process Models for Earthquake Occurrences"
  • Oct 12, 2015: Sara Emerson, Oregon State University, "Biomarker/Diagnostic Test Performance Bounds from Comparison to Imperfect Reference Test"
  • **Oct 15, 2015: (Special Day) Vanda de Carvalho, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile."Semiparametric Bayesian inference for the Youden index and its corresponding optimal cutoff value." Kidder Hall Rm# 278
  • Oct 19, 2015: Adam Sykulski, University College, London, "Nonstationary Time Series Modeling and Estimation with Applications in Oceanography"
  • Oct 26, 2015: Rui Feng, University of Pennsylvania, "Causal Inference Using Categorical Instrumental Variables"
  • Nov 02, 2015: Thuan Nguyen, Oregon Health and Science University, "Classified Mixed Model Prediction"
  • Nov 09, 2015: Adrian Raftery, University of Washington, "Probabilistic Population Projections with Migration Uncertainty"
  • Nov 16, 2015: Don Percival, University of Washington, "Fitting Statistical Models to DART Buoy Data for Operational Tsunami Forecasting"
  • Nov 23, 2015: (Horizon Room, Memorial Union Hall) Peter Bickel, University of California, Berkeley, "Statistics,the transfer science, Big Data, and an experience with ENCODE"
  • **Nov 24, 2015: (Special Day) Peter Bickel, University of California, Berkeley, "Erdos-Renyi nodes in block models and determining how many blocks are needed for adequate description"
  • January 6, 2014: First week of classes, no seminar
  • January 13, 2014: Gu Mi, PhD Student, OSU Statistics: "Goodness-of-Fit Tests and Model Diagnostics for Negative Binomial Regression of RNA sequencing Data" (Room 106 Owen Hall)
  • February 25, 2014: Kathryn M. Irvine, US Geological Survey, Nothern Rocky Mountain Science Center, "Graphical causal models: the next multimodel inference regime change needed in Ecology?" (Room 212 Kearney Hall)
  • March 3, 2014: Hadley Wickham, R Studio (Room 106 Owen Hall)
  • April 3, 2014: Yiyi Chen, Assistant Professor, Division of Biostatistics, Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, "The use of testing confidence value for the transitional decisions of single-arm phase II oncology trials" (Room 102 Furman Hall)
  • April 7, 2014: Sandrine Dudoit, Professor, Division of Biostatistics, School of School of Public Health, and Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley (CH2M HILL Alumni Center)
  • April 14, 2014: Michael Wu, Assistant Member, Biostatistics and Biomathematics Program, Public Health Sciences Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. " Integrative Genomic Analysis and Detecting Epistasis using Flexible Statistical Methods" (Room 106 Owen Hall)
  • April 21, 2014: Yongli Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Decision Sciences, University of Oregon (Room 106 Owen Hall)
  • April 28, 2014: Heping Zhang, Susan Dwight Bliss Professor, Department of Biostatistics; Professor, Yale Child Study Center and Department of Statistics, Yale University (Room 106 Owen Hall)
  • May 12, 2014: Shuangge Ma, Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Yale University (Room 106 Owen Hall)
  • May 19, 2014: Thomas Sharpton, Assistant Professor, Departments of Microbiology and Statistics, Oregon State University (Room 106 Owen Hall)
  • September 29, 2014: Statistics Department Orientation (required for all Statistics students and faculty) (Room 102 Bexell Hall)
  • October 6, 2014: Research summaries from Statistics Department Faculty (Room 102 Bexell Hall)
  • **October 15, 2014: Wednesday (Special date) ASA Oregon Chapter Meeting **5:30 pm - 8:30 pm (Room 305 Kearney Hall) "Bayesian Model Selection for Multiple Genetic Models: Application to GWAS Data" Must RSVP to fuentesc@stat.oregonstate.edu if you are planning to attend.
  • October 20, 2014: Jennifer Huckett, Associate, Cadmus Consulting, Energy Services Division (Room 102 Bexell Hall), "Strategies for Addressing Sampling and Analysis Challenges in Energy Efficiency Program Evaluation"
  • **October 31, 2014: Friday (Special date) John Sall, Co-founder and Executive Vice President of SAS **2:00 pm - 3:00 pm (Room 4001 Ag Life Sciences Bldg) "From Big Data to Big Statistics"
  • November 3, 2014: Dan Cooley, Colorado State University (Room 102 Bexell Hall) "Data mining for Extreme Behavior and Application to Ground Level Ozone"
  • **November 4, 2014: Tuesday (Special date) David A. Dickey, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Statistics, North Carolina State University **12:00 noon - 1:00 pm (Room 103 Bexell Hall) "Overview of Data Mining"
  • November 10, 2014: Kristen Gore, Statistician, Hewlett-Packard Company (Room 102 Bexell Hall), "Unbiased Penetrance Estimates with Unknown Ascertainment Strategies"
  • November 17, 2014: Addison James, Oregon State University (Room 102 Bexell Hall), "Nonparametric Information Criterion for Model-Assisted Survey Estimators"
  • November 24, 2014: Yanming Di, Professor, Oregon State University (Room 102 Bexell Hall), "Statistical Issues in Differential Expression Analysis of RNA-Sequencing Data"
  • October 1, 2013: Marie Davidian, 2013 President of the American Statistical Association and William Neal Reynolds, Professor of Statistics North Carolina State University. "The Right Treatment for the Right Patient (at the Right Time): Personalized Medicine and Statistics"
  • October 12, 2013: Tim Hesterburg, Google, Inc. (this seminar is at PSU). "Apps, Earthquakes, and Survival: some statistical stories from Google and beyond"
  • October 14, 2013: Len Stefanski, Drexel Professor - Department of Statistics North Carolina State University. "Measurement Error and Variable Selection in Parametric and Nonparametric Models"
  • October 21, 2013: Sastry Pantula, Dean – Oregon State University College of Science. "ABCs @ NSF" (Room 102 Owen Hall)
  • October 28, 2013: Don Dillman, Regents Professor in the Department of Sociology at Washington State University. (Room 102 Owen Hall)
  • November 4, 2013: Bryan Wright, Ariel Muldoon, Matt Nahorniak (former OSU M.S. students). (Room 203 Strand Hall).
  • November 11, 2013: OSU Statistics Dept, brief summary of research areas. (Room 203 Strand Hall)
  • November 18, 2013: Leigh Ann Harrod, Environmental Consultant and former Oregon State University PhD student) (Room 203 Strand Hall)
  • November 25, 2013: Qiongxia Song, Department of Mathematics – University of Texas at Dallas. (Room 203 Strand Hall)