Imagine working for the Department of Motor Vehicles, not as a desk clerk or driving test administrator, but at the central office in Salem. Imagine that you were tasked with ascertaining how best to allocate fuel tax revenue. This revenue comes from the tax on fuel purchased for cars and trucks, marine boats, off-highway vehicles and other motorized vehicles. How would you go about distributing the revenue to the agencies responsible for these vehicles?

A survey to determine the fuel used in each category might be a good option, but where to begin? The Oregon State University Survey Research Center is ready to help. Since 1973 the Survey Research Center (SRC) has been working with Oregon State faculty and state government agencies to help them conduct and analyze surveys.

In addition to working with more than 15 different agencies in Salem including the Oregon Department of Transportation, Oregon State Marine Board and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the SRC has worked with Oregon State University faculty and staff on a variety of projects. Examples range from investigations in applied economics to surveys of students graduating from the College of Science.

"It's fascinating because I learned so much about the state for each survey we work with," said Virginia Lesser, head of the Survey Research Center.

The art of survey design

The process of survey design involves first working with the client to determine the budget and the population to be surveyed. Throughout the entire process there is constant back and forth with the client to figure out exactly what they want and what is possible.

Sometimes clients come in looking to survey a specific segment of the population, such as people who use their service. However, there is often no way of knowing exactly who comprises that population. An important component in designing surveys is to determine and accurately define the population from which the results are gathered. In order to obtain measures of confidence around any estimates, probability sampling must be used.

With probability sampling, every member of the population has an equal chance of being surveyed because they are drawn from a random distribution.

In contrast, non-probability sampling involves selecting from a non-random distribution, such as those who seek out a survey to participate in. Due to the lack of a random selection of individuals, it's impossible to identify biases or compute other measurements. Therefore, data collected using non-probability sampling should be interpreted with caution due to the impact of selection bias.

"So the challenge I have is working with a client to figure out how to get the opinions they need when they don't know who the people are that use their service," Lesser said.

Once the population has been selected, there are three primary components to designing a survey: writing the questions, selecting the probability samples and correctly analyzing the survey data. Writing questions is a bit of an art. Good survey questions should be both unbiased and flow well within a questionnaire. The sample selection depends on the population one is looking to reach and the sampling design. The statistical analysis methods must account for the sampling design and any survey errors, such as nonresponse.

The future of survey distribution

Survey administration methods have evolved significantly over the last several years. Phone-based surveys are not used as much as they were 20 years ago due to the low response rates. Web surveys have become more prominent.

Today the Survey Research Center conducts most of its probability-based surveys using a hybrid web and mail approach, combining the usability of the internet with the higher quality and response rates of mail. This ensures reaching a wider array of demographics than either form would alone.

A key advantage of mail-based surveys is that one can easily mail out surveys to every address or a random sample of addresses in an area. The list of addresses used to select the probability samples for SRC surveys covers nearly 100% of all households in the US. The hybrid web and mail approach provides the opportunity for all selected households to respond either by mail or by web. Thus not all households need to have internet access.

Another method to contact survey participants uses email addresses. Email-based surveys may also be used in cases where the SRC or the client knows the email addresses for the population and know that all potential participants have access to email, for example surveys of Oregon State faculty and students.

Increasingly, more surveys are being conducted using non-probability online panels. These panels are composed of people volunteering to complete surveys in exchange for remuneration or other benefits. They have become popular in recent years due to how cheaply and easily they can be used to get relatively large samples. However, the individuals from an online panel who complete a survey are not a random sample of the population. These respondents choose to actively participate because of personal interest, or because of some sort of incentive, such as a gift card.

Due to their self-selecting nature, estimates from non-probability panel surveys tend to be biased as compared to results from probability sampling methods. Relying on non-probability panels for unbiased information would be like relying on a jury entirely made up of people who really want to be on it.

In addition to its work helping others conduct surveys, the Survey Research Center staff also conduct original research. The main focus of their research is on comparing the effectiveness of different survey techniques, studying how even minute details such as envelope color and size, incentives and content of cover letters impact response rates.

Survey response rates continue to decrease and the research conducted by the SRC examines methods to improve response rates in their surveys. Recently, one of Lesser’s graduate students has been working on how to combine probability and non-probability samples, and thus how to integrate the two approaches.

In our ever-changing social and technological landscape, keeping a finger on the pulse of public opinion is vital. The behind-the-scenes work of designing survey questions and researching survey methods is just as vital. For the past 50 years, the Survey Research Center has done both, through their original research and the services they provided to their clients within and without Oregon State University.

Four-dimensional tissue self-assembly, integrated river health and ultra-tiny spectrometers: The 2022 College of Science Research and Innovation Seed (SciRIS) award recipients will use collaboration to fill critical knowledge gaps across numerous scientific disciplines to drive real-world impact.

The SciRIS program funds projects based on collaborative research within the College of Science community and beyond. There are two tracks through the program: SciRIS (Stages 1-3) and the SciRIS individual investigator award (SciRIS-ii).

SciRIS Stages 1-3 funds teams in three stages of increasing funding to support training, research and capacity-building, accelerating work toward external funding opportunities. SciRIS-ii funds individual faculty to establish research relationships with external partners, enabling them to demonstrate the feasibility of their ideas and quickening the pace of scientific discovery.

SciRIS-ii Awardees

The following three scientists received SciRIS-ii awards: Bo Sun, Clayton Petsche and Ethan Minot.

Associate Professor of Physics Bo Sun’s research aims to lay the foundation for programmable four-dimensional tissue self-assembly. Current technologies have been unable to harness these naturally occurring processes to assemble dynamic tissue structures for biomedical and therapeutic applications. Four-dimensional tissue self-assembly is critical for many physiological processes including acute wound healing and in lethal tumor metastasis.

Sun and his collaborator, Yang Jiao from Arizona State University, will be building on eight years of collaborative research in the field of cell mechanics and cell migration that has resulted in eight publications.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Clayton Petsche will use his SciRIS grant to help three graduate students complete sub projects within the realm of arithmetic dynamical systems. The research will be entirely student-focused and will help establish their research credentials before entering the postdoctoral job market.

Professor of Physics Ethan Minot will use his award to bring ultra-miniaturized spectrometer technology to Oregon State and pursue follow-up opportunities.

In 2022, with co-authors from Finland, Minot was part of a study published in Science that resulted in a powerful, ultra-tiny spectrometer. Contributing to a field known as optical spectrometry, their discovery could improve everything from smartphone cameras to environmental monitoring.

Minot plans to bring the technology to Oregon to grow the new field of research.

SciRIS Stage 1 Awardees

Four groups of scientists received SciRIS Stage 1 awards up to $10K.

Associate Professor of Statistics Yuan Jiang, along with Anna Jolles, professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, received a SciRIS Stage 1 grant for a project which will help fill a knowledge gap and provide crucial tools to understand microbial community dynamics.

The team will develop a novel analytical pipeline that harnesses longitudinal microbiome data to define the ecological roles of host-associate microbes. Although the accumulation of microbial communities is essential to animal health, there are few statistical routes adequate for characterizing microbial community dynamics through time.

Integrative Biology Professor Anna Jolles and Carson College of Veterinary Medicine Professor Claudia Häse will use their SciRIS Stage 1 award to study eco-evolutionary host-bacterial-phage dynamics. Collaborating with a researcher from the University of Louisiana, the group will be using the Pacific oyster and shellfish pathogen Vibrio coralliilyticus as a model system.

In a project entitled “Bioinformatics for integrated river health,” Integrative Biology Professors David Lytle and Anna Jolles, along with Justin Sanders from the Carson College of Veterinary Medicine, will bring together expertise across disciplines to provide an integrated approach to understanding river health. The group will combine expertise in bioinformatic and genetic methods for characterizing aquatic invertebrate communities, aquatic parasite and pathogen communities, and fish microbiomes. Samples will come from the lower Colorado River, an ecologically and culturally significant ecosystem.

Biochemistry and Biophysics Associate Professors David Hendrix and Colin Johnson, along with Professor of Chemistry Claudia Maier and Patrick Reardon, director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility at Oregon State, received a SciRIS Stage 1 award to create a pipeline of computational and experimental methods for the prediction, identification and functional characterization of microproteins. Previously dismissed due to their small size, microproteins are now thought to play significant physiological roles including pathological roles in cancer progression.

Disease Mechanism and Prevention Fund

Researching Parkinson’s disease, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Alysia Vrailas-Mortimer received a grant from the College of Science Disease Mechanism and Prevention Fund for a project entitled “Why is a fly a good model to study my grandmother’s tremors?”

Similar to the SciRIS-ii, the fund is focused on assisting individual faculty efforts to establish research relationships with external partners for projects specifically related to health science.

Using fruit flies, Vrailas-Mortimer’s goal is to determine how a stress response protein protects against Parkinson’s-associated iron-induced oxidative damage. Parkinson’s affects over one million people in the U.S. and her research could provide the basis for future therapeutic strategies.

With areas of distinction in marine science, materials science, data science, biomedical science – and other research areas, OSU faculty and students are fighting climate change and moving the world forward to a greener future – whether that is through harnessing new materials, interpreting complex data or reimagining how organisms can adapt to changes. We share just a few examples in this three-part series.

Oregon State University scientists are rapidly rising to the challenge of our changing climate, supported by hundreds of graduate and undergraduate researchers who are committed to leaving a better world than the one they inherited. In part three of this series, we examine some of the data-driven research that is helping usher in a new era of climate policy and action.

Mathematics and statistics are two of the quickest-growing fields in the country, and it's not hard to guess why. As technology advances, mathematical modeling or statistical analysis can provide a faster, more reliable way to examine lots of data. In practice, these skills can provide critical insight to collaborative projects or inform policymakers on the most environmentally sound decisions.

Wildlife behavior

Making green energy safer for wildlife

Professor of statistics Lisa Madsen and statisticians from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have come together to develop methodology to estimate the total mortality of bats, birds and other small creatures on wind farms and solar facilities. The Endangered Species Act requires that wind farms pay particular attention to endangered or threatened species such as golden eagles, brown pelicans, whooping cranes, condors and Indiana bats, which are killed when they accidentally collide with turbine blades.

Madsen and her colleagues have developed complex statistical tools that estimate the actual number of carcasses when they are undetectable for any reason by taking into account a host of predictor variables such as searcher efficiency, variations in plot sizes and location of inaccessible areas.

The software package, created by the team, will be utilized by government agencies as well as Western EcoSystems Technology, Inc., which has already begun to implement the software to assist their clients. The project has also attracted attention from environmental and government agencies in Canada, South Africa, Portugal and Scotland among others. In addition, the USGS statisticians have conducted workshops demonstrating how to use the software to estimate animal mortality at wind and solar energy facilities.

Seed funding from the College of Science Research and Innovation Seed (SciRIS) program continues to bolster ambitious and expansive projects, empowering our scientists to delve into fundamental research discoveries and translate them into revolutionary applications. Founded in 2018, the SciRIS program provides funding for collaborative projects that pursue fundamental discoveries and create societal impact, accelerating the pace of research, discovery and innovation in the College of Science.

Between 2019 and 2021, the SciRIS program provided $763K in seed funding to scientists leading research projects in both basic and applied science and mathematics, with the potential to produce practical solutions for industry, people and the planet.

There are two pathways through this program, the SciRIS Stages 1-3 awards and the SciRIS individual investigator award (SciRIS-ii). The SciRIS Stages 1-3 program funds teams in three stages, ranging from $10K to $125K, to foster team development, build capacity and accelerate project development for procuring larger external grants, while the SciRIS-ii program provides funds ranging from $10K to $20K to individual investigators to establish partnerships, accelerate project development, generate data and manuscripts and foster proposal submissions.

The 2022 Science Research and Innovation Seed Individual Investigator awards (SciRIS-ii) are catalyzing initiatives that will open fresh pathways in science.

Supporting pure and applied mathematics, agriculture, gene therapy, molecular movie technology and quantum mechanics

A wildlife research biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), Brent Wolf couldn't be happier with the career path he's found. “Coming to Oregon was a great choice, I love living out here,” he said. Wolf is also a graduate student in the College of Science’s two-year online Graduate Program in Data Analytics, a flexible program that allows him to continue working the job he loves while getting his degree. He was drawn to the program as a way to get a leg up in his current role, and so far it has paid off. “Going for the M.S. in data analytics has opened some doors for me that were previously closed,” he said.

Finding fulfillment with wildlife research

Wolf mapped out his career path early. “I grew up watching Steve Irwin and BBC nature shows, plus I enjoy being able to be outside and solve problems. Wildlife is just a good fit for all of that,” Wolf said. As a research biologist, he collects and analyzes data on a variety of Oregon species, including black-tailed deer, Columbian white-tailed deer and the American marten.

After graduating from the Florida Institute of Technology with a B.S. in ecology and marine biology, Wolf encountered some of the drawbacks of working with wildlife: low pay and frequent moves between seasonal jobs. “ODFW is the first spot where I actually have a permanent job with upward mobility,” he said.

To make a bigger impact at ODFW, Wolf decided to go back to school for data analytics. Oregon State’s award-winning Ecampus program “jumped out because it was an M.S. and offered some courses that I really wanted to take,” he said. Unlike most online learning opportunities, Ecampus courses are taught by the same faculty who teach in-person, giving students access to experienced, committed professionals in every field.

“I really enjoyed Professor Lan Xue, especially her survival statistics course,” said Wolf. “It’s really hard to get good at something like that without some instruction.”

“If you say some vaccine is x percent effective, what does that really mean?” asked Audrey Dickinson (M.S. Data Analytics ’21). The Oregon State alumna went back to school to learn how to answer just such important questions.

Dickinson was working as an engineer at HP in Corvallis when she realized that a better understanding of data would make her work even more impactful. The value of data for industry really stood out to her, she said. Oregon State’s two-year online Graduate Program in Data Analytics gave her the flexibility to earn her credentials while still working full-time at HP.

“There are a lot of great professors and the coursework was very valuable. Right away, I applied things that I was learning to my real-life job,” she said. Professor Charlotte Wickham in the statistics department was particularly engaging: “she has a data visualization course which has helped me immensely in communicating data analytics,” said Dickinson.

Ensuring ethical use of data

Since graduating from the Data Analytics program, Dickinson traded her engineering role for that of a Driver Analyst at HP, looking at key data points driving business metrics. In today’s unpredictable world, the value of professionals who can accurately interpret data and forecast results is greater than ever.

Data analytics is “very powerful,” Dickinson said, but understanding its limitations is also important. Equally vital are the ethical use of data and integrity in how we convey supposedly cut-and-dry scientific figures to a public not initiated into the scientific process.

“We talk a bit about that in our data science courses,” Dickinson said. “If you report something in a very scientific manner, how is that interpreted by the general public?” Although science is often thought of as objective, how we communicate it and present data has a big effect on how it is perceived.

“If someone comes to you and they say, ‘I can predict this with a certain amount of accuracy,’ what does that truly mean? And how much confidence can you really stake in their results? I think that’s powerful to know and understand,” she said.

Finding identity in STEM

Before delving into data analytics for her master’s, Dickinson earned her B.S. in chemical engineering at Oregon State. Although a minority as a woman in many of her classes, she “always had a lot of support” in her program, finding community in Oregon State’s engineering sorority Phi Sigma Rho and inspiration in the excellent mentoring and involvement of professors like Willie E. 'Skip' Rochefort. “He’s a very unique person,” she said, always participating in events like Discovery Days to get students more involved.

Dickinson knows the value of getting hands-on with math and science in early education, because her mom was a middle-school math teacher growing up. STEM was accessible and inviting to Dickinson from an early age, but she acknowledges that is not the case for students who may struggle with math and how to apply it practically.

“I think math and science can be this ladder-esque study, where if you feel like you struggle with it at a certain point in your life, and then you progress, you may never feel like you’re confident or you’re good at it.” Students can have bias in how they perceive their own skills, she said, due to past experiences.

Katherine McLaughlin is a statistical detective of sorts, employing sampling and data analysis methods to identify and understand hard-to-reach or hidden populations. An assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Oregon State University, McLaughlin’s work explores a large number and wide variety of at-risk populations around the globe and involves collaborations with epidemiologists, statisticians, and public health officials.

Last summer the onset of the pandemic drove her statistical research towards a different direction. McLaughlin was appointed co-principal investigator with Oregon State University’s nationally recognized TRACE-COVID-19 project. She is TRACE’s lead researcher on providing statistical analyses and guidance. In this role, McLaughlin develops robust and innovative sampling designs and data analyses for community testing, as well as dissemination of public facing results for TRACE-OSU.

The highly successful TRACE-COVID-19 project has set a national example in containing COVID-19 risk. Oregon State researchers, including McLaughlin, recently received a $2 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to create a national TRACE Center that will expand OSU’s COVID-19 public health project to other states.

“I was drawn to respondent-driven sampling because it merges my interest in designing specialized sampling methods tailored to the needs of a population with the possibility to help groups that are typically underserved and face elevated risk of HIV and other diseases.”

Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics, or TRACE-COVID-19, was launched by OSU in April, 2020 with door-to-door sampling in Corvallis, home to Oregon State’s main campus, and expanded to other cities around the state while also adding a wastewater testing component.

In late September, at the start of the academic year, TRACE also started conducting prevalence testing among OSU students, faculty and staff in Corvallis, at OSU-Cascades in Bend and at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon.

Putting statistics to use in the cause of public health

McLaughlin’s research on sampling methods made her the ideal scientist for TRACE. “My work on TRACE aligns well with my interest in sampling methodology, where the challenge is to design a data collection strategy tailored to the unique needs of the population that will best allow the research question to be addressed,” said McLaughlin.

While spearheading sampling and modeling methods at TRACE, McLaughlin has responded to unique challenges in different communities across Oregon, with several variables at play. For instance, she and her colleagues had to figure how to best incorporate wastewater data collected in advance of TRACE sampling to inform allocation of field teams to households within the community.

In her own research on vulnerable populations, McLaughlin has similarly estimated prevalence of HIV or the proportion of a population that are victims of human trafficking, and typically elude standard sampling and estimation procedures. More broadly, McLaughlin is interested in social science applications of statistics, for example, understanding how human behaviors contribute to things like missing data on surveys of at-risk populations.

This dimension of her research also exists in her work at TRACE, where she analyzes “how differential participation rates may be impacting our estimates.”

Hidden populations constitute socially stigmatized groups that are reluctant to disclose their identities, remaining largely invisible to researchers. Due to this difficulty in locating members of a small target population, researchers have encountered a dearth of data on the characteristics and demographics of hidden populations.

In her statistical research, McLaughlin has developed new data sampling designs and computational models to estimate characteristics of hidden populations around the world. These comprise female sex workers (FSW), men who have sex with men (MSM), victims of sexual violence, people who inject drugs (PWID) and migrants — some of the groups most vulnerable to infectious diseases, substance misuse and behavioral health issues.

Her models to estimate the size of hidden populations attempt to address shortcomings in existing methods of population inference. Her research contributions have included important modifications and extensions to respondent-driven sampling — a type of chain-referral sample used by the CDC, WHO, UNAIDS and other organizations that utilizes the social/peer network of relationships and friendships of a population to recruit and enroll individuals who may be at high risk for HIV/AIDS and related infections.

McLaughlin is currently working on new models that account for measurement error and examining their effectiveness using different parameters and in a wide variety of real data applications. According to McLaughlin, these models have the potential to correct numerous biases that arise from self-reported social network size due to missing data and intentional and unintentional misreporting.

She has worked with data from populations of FSW, MSM, migrants, and PWID in Morocco; women with sexual violence related pregnancies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; FSW, MSM, and PWID in Armenia; MSM and PWID in Kosovo; MSM in Italy, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia; and PWID from the United States in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Discovering statistics

McLaughlin took her first statistics course as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley and, in her own words, “was hooked from the first class.” She loved learning how to gather information and solve complex real-world problems using quantitative methods.

A REU project (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) on election auditing introduced McLaughlin to research and inspired her to apply to graduate school. As a graduate student at UCLA, McLaughlin wanted to pursue a thesis topic that would have “real-world impact and would benefit people.” As she learned more about the statistical challenges of sampling hidden populations, she discovered there was room for much needed improvement of standard sampling and estimation techniques, and it became a fruitful area to work on during her Ph.D.

“I was drawn to respondent-driven sampling because it merges my interest in designing specialized sampling methods tailored to the needs of a population with the possibility to help groups that are typically underserved and face elevated risk of HIV and other diseases,” said McLaughlin.

Several undergraduate and graduate mentors helped McLaughlin connect with statistics and succeed in the field. She considers herself fortunate for having the support of amazing mentors at all stages of her education.

“In particular, my undergraduate research and thesis mentor, Phillip Stark, helped me develop research and scientific writing skills and encouraged me to apply to graduate school. My Ph.D. advisor, Mark Handcock, guided me through the complexities of academia and introduced me to a wide range of collaborators. Lisa Johnston, an epidemiologist I collaborate with frequently for respondent-driven sampling studies, has also been a great mentor for interdisciplinary work,” said McLaughlin.

She is currently involved with a wide range of research projects that revolve around making hidden population estimation more broadly applicable. These include using multiple years of data in a capture-recapture framework (a collaboration with Brian Kim from the University of Maryland) and extending the methodology for clustered hidden populations (work by Oregon State Ph.D. student Laura Gamble).

McLaughlin received the College of Science Research and Innovation Seed Program Award to support her research on estimating the number of people who inject drugs in metropolitan areas in the U.S. as a way to contain the HIV epidemic and slow the rate of transmission. In collaboration with CDC, she is developing innovative sampling analysis and statistical methodologies to obtain more precise estimates of the size of the hidden populations that are at high risk for contracting and transmitting HIV.

McLaughlin has also helped to broaden the use of respondent-driven sampling to other types of hidden populations, including trafficked populations.

From designing models to collect accurate information about social groups to estimating the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Oregon, McLaughlin’s research has had tangible impact and implications for public health. Her statistical models hold great promise for unbiased estimates of hidden populations and effective public health interventions.

American life has been irrevocably altered by the deadliest pandemic in a century. Scientists at Oregon State University acted swiftly to the greatest public health emergency of our time, leveraging the College of Science’s unique capabilities in biomedical research and the quantitative sciences to investigate and contain the coronavirus crisis.

In April, several OSU scientists hailing from different colleges and centers on campus leapt to action to tackle surging coronavirus infections in America. They were driven by widespread diagnostic test shortages in America as well as the lack of data on asymptomatic individuals. The result was a public health study started in Corvallis called Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics, or TRACE-COVID-19. It was among the first of its kind in the country to test the prevalence of the virus in an entire community through door-to-door sampling in representative sets of neighborhoods.

“The impetus for us was that equipment required to do the laboratory tests to detect the virus is present in a lot of research labs on campus. We started to problem solve and understand how a land grant university that has relationships with communities across the state could help during this crisis,” said Benjamin Dalziel, lead investigator of the TRACE project and an assistant professor of integrative biology and mathematics.

It goes without saying that a massive project like this would typically take shape over the course of several months. However, in a stunning feat, the TRACE team developed the project from scratch in a matter of weeks, and it is now garnering attention nationally as a model for other universities. The public health study is a joint effort by OSU’s Colleges of Science, Public Health and Human Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, Engineering and the Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine. It is co-directed by Jeff Bethel, associate professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences.

"TRACE’s primary goal is to mobilize the capacities of the land grant university to help the communities we serve.”

As a project director, Dalziel takes a leading role in data analysis and the design of the study to enable inferences important to understanding the infection rate and transmission patterns. He is at ease working with a wide range of collaborators, something he has done frequently in his academic career.

“I really enjoy working on a team where the expertise is diverse — partly because everybody has a chance to be humble and wear our learner’s hats,” said Dalziel. “We have this wonderful team of 10 co-investigators, and each of us is a non-expert in most of the areas we are working on. I think it brings out the best in TRACE as we learn from each other.”

The study, conducted in partnership with Benton County health officials, was initially funded by OSU and a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and has been aided by work from the OSU Foundation and the OSU Alumni Association. Funding from PacificSource Health plans has allowed for the project to expand to Bend, Newport and Hermiston in joint efforts with Deschutes, Lincoln and Umatilla counties, as well as increase sampling in Corvallis. Dalziel received $800K from PacificSource Health Plans and two grants from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for $750K and $400K to aid the expansion of the TRACE-COVID-19 project.

The TRACE-COVID-19 team, comprising 10 scientists and more than 300 volunteers was selected for the prestigious 2020 Beaver Champion Award, which will be presented at a virtual celebration honoring University Day Award Recipients on Monday, September 14. This Oregon State president’s award recognizes an individual or individuals who continually demonstrate outstanding effort and achievement of excellence, extra effort beyond that requested, and performance of the highest quality.

Discovering ecology and mathematics

Dalziel grew up in Ontario, Canada. He spent a good chunk of summer each year in the wilderness of Northern Ontario, which fueled his passion for nature and the environment and led him to study ecology. Dalziel immersed himself in ecology and mathematical sciences as an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph in Ontario. He also obtained a master’s degree in biology at the University of Guelph before earning a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University.

The College of Science is proud to congratulate Charlotte Wickham, an assistant professor in the statistics department, for receiving the 2020 Ecampus Excellence in Online Teaching and Student Engagement Award. In a non-remote world, Charlotte would have received the award in a ceremony in the Alumni Center. In lieu an awards ceremony, please join us in congratulating her for making a difference for students and their education.

The fourth annual Oregon State University Ecampus Awards recognize outstanding faculty partners who go the extra mile to develop meaningful and innovative online learning environments for OSU’s distance students. Each winner is an exceptional partner of OSU’s Ecampus, a change-maker in the lives of distance students and a leader in the field of online education.

Charlotte Wickham, an assistant professor in the in the Department of Statistics in the College of Science, is one of three OSU faculty who have received this award. Wickham has developed multiple Ecampus courses built around students and their learning, leveraging open source materials and engaging texts from the OSU Library. Student nominations focused on several key areas, including Charlotte’s engagement in student discussions and her encouragement of experimentation, even if that approach requires more individualized time and feedback in facilitation.

One student noted “I never felt like I needed to rein in an assignment and only do just what was required when I really wanted to run with an idea. … That’s great teaching.”

Another student pointed out her thorough organization and the passion that goes into the development of each of her Ecampus course. Charlotte approaches her students with enthusiasm, and students leave her classes excited about statistics and prepared to take on today’s data-driven environment.

The 2020 Ecampus Excellence in Online Teaching and Student Engagement Award recognizes three faculty members who exemplify excellence in online teaching and student engagement. Ecampus faculty and instructors are nominated for this award by current online students. This year, 284 students nominated more than 140 faculty and instructors for this award.

The 5th Stan Conference will take place at Oregon State University on August 11-14, 2020. The four-day conference will include two days of tutorials followed by an exciting scientific program comprising talks, posters, open discussions and statistical modeling.

Registration for Stan 2020 is now open. Researchers, students and professionals are encouraged to register for the conference which includes all tutorials. The conference is also soliciting session proposals, contributed talks and posters. Deadlines and other information can be found here.

Stan is a freedom-respecting, open-source software that has had an extensive and far-reaching impact on Bayesian computations for a broad range of applied statistics and data science problems.

The conference typically draws 300 attendees from academia, industry and government agencies. The conference offers a great opportunity for students and other participants to learn about Bayesian computation. Previous Stan Conferences were held at Columbia University, New York, and Cambridge University, U.K., among other places.

Plenary speakers at Stan 2020 are Elizabeth Wolkovich from the University of British Columbia and Adrian Rafftery, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Debashis Mondal, associate professor in the Department of Statistics at OSU, is a co-organizer of Stan 2020. The other organizers of Stan 2020 are Susana Marquez, The Rockefeller Foundation; Eric J. Ward, Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NOAA); Yi Zhang, Metrum Research Group; and Daniel Lee, Generable.

Follow Stan on Twitter.