Emily Palmer has achieved an impressive string of accomplishments this year, marking major milestones in both her research and academic recognition. After successfully completing her preliminary exam, the first part of Emily’s dissertation, A group penalization framework for detecting time-lagged microbiota-host associations (Palmer et al., 2025) was published in Frontiers in Genetics. Recently, Emily received the Dissertation Completion Award from the Office of Graduate Education and is planning to defend her work this summer. In addition to these accomplishments, Emily was selected for the Department of Statistics’ Jerome C. Li Award. This scholarship is given to the top PhD student each year. Congratulations to Emily on this exceptional year of achievements!