Amy Willis
Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
F-657, Box 357232
Health Sciences Building, 1959 NE Pacific St
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 543 8027
Email: adwillis(at)uw(dot)edu (My CV)
A theme that connects the problems that I work on is biodiversity. I am interested in biological communities, the relatedness of different taxa, the number and proportion of different species in an ecosystem, and causes of shifts in ecologies.
I am especially interested in microbial communities, which are incredibly diverse, responsive, and critical to ecosystem function. Microbiome statistics is an exciting field with a pressing need for new tools and understanding, and I hope to continue to contribute to its development in the coming years.
From a statistical standpoint, I love quirky and non-standard statistical problems. Non-Euclidean metric spaces, boundary value problems, heavy-tailed estimators, and other situations that fall outside common regularity conditions fascinate me.
I joined the faculty at UW Biostatistics in July 2017, so if you are a student or colleague please drop by my office to introduce yourself! If you are a graduate student looking for a new project, come and talk to me about your interests! I have many ideas for achievable and interesting projects that are perfectly suited to graduate student research -- including options at any point on the applied-methods-theory spectrum.