Norm Breslow Endowed Faculty

Professor of Biostatistics & Statistics

Interim Chair of Biostatistics

University of Washington

Contact | Scholar | GitHub

News and Updates

• I am honored to be serving as the Interim Chair of UW Biostatistics during the 2025-26 academic year.
• We have a couple of new and exciting papers and manuscripts available online:
• A Unified Framework for Semi-Parametrically Efficient Semi-Supervised Learning (joint with Dwight Xu and Daniela Witten) is now on arXiv.
• GLM Inference with AI-Generated Synthetic Data Using Misspecified Linear Regression (joint with Nir Keret) is also on arXiv, with a new version coming soon.
• Integer Programming for Learning Directed Acyclic Graphs From Non-Identifiable Gaussian Models (joint with Tong Xu, Armeen Taeb and Simge Kucukyavuz) has been accepted in Biometrika.
• Doubly-Regularized Generalized Linear Models for Spatial Observations with High-Dimensional Covariates (joint with Arjun Sondhi and Si Cheng) has been accepted in Journal of Royal Statistical Society (JRSS-C).
Principal Component Analysis Balancing Prediction and Approximation Accuracy for Spatial Data (joint with Si Cheng, Lianne Sheppard and Adam Szpiro) has been accepted in Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (JCGS).
• This year, three students received best paper awards in 2025 ASA competitions and will present their work at JSM 2025 topic contributed sessions. CONGRATULATIONS, GUYS!
• Michael Hellstern received a best paper award from Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS)
• Keshav Motwani received a best paper award from the Section on Statistics in Imaging
• Zichun (Dwight) Xu received a best paper award from the Nonparametric Statistics Section
• CONGRATULATIONS to Michael Hellstern for winning a best poster award at the Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS). Mike's award-winning paper has been accepted to AISTAT 2025 and is available here.
• CONGRATULATIONS to Xiudi Li for accepting an Assistant Professor position at UC Berkeley Biostatistics.
• Excited to start working on a new NIH U01 grant titled Statistical Methods for Inferring Gene-Phenotype Associations Using Omic Data from Gene Knockout and Human Phenotype Studies in collaboration with FHCC colleagues, Wei Sun and Li Hsu.
• CONGRATULATIONS to Si Cheng for successfully defending her PhD dissertations. Nice job, Dr. Cheng!
• CONGRATULATIONS to Lu Xia for accepting an Assistant Professor position at the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University.
• CONGRATULATIONS to Si Cheng for having her paper, A Penalized Poisson Likelihood Approach to High-Dimensional Semi-Parametric Inference for Doubly-Stochastic Point Processes, selected for a honorable mention award by the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA).
• I am honored to have been elected as Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics (IMS).
• I'm excited to start working on a new NIH XAI grant titled Explainable Machine Learning to Guide Prefrontal Brain Stimulation in collaboration with UW colleagues, Zaid Harchaoui, Azadeh Yazdan and Eric Shea-Brown. This project combines statistical learning and applied math with neurobiology and bioengineering to help understand how the brain’s rich internal dynamics can be harnessed to steer its plasticity. We'll have lots of interesting data to solve really cool statistical problems!
• I am honored to have been elected as Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). Congratulations to all my fellow ASA fellows!
• I am honored to receive the 2022 Leo Breiman Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS). This award reflects the excellent work by my amazing team and would not have been possible without the guiadance of my mentors and collaborators over the years.
• The newest version of the netgsa package offers considerable speedups and interactive network visualization. Check out the accompanying paper published in PLoS Comp Bio for details and the vignette for examples.