Biostatistics Seminar: Evaluating the Evaluators: Measuring Uncertainty and Failure in LLMs and LLM judges
Speaker: Lucy Lu Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington
Title: Evaluating the Evaluators: Measuring Uncertainty and Failure in LLMs and LLM judges
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support scientific and medical tasks, including literature synthesis, evidence summarization, and plain-language communication for patients and caregivers. While these systems offer new opportunities to broaden access to biomedical knowledge, their outputs can be inconsistent, incomplete, or confidently incorrect. At the same time, evaluation (how we measure model performance) has become increasingly difficult for long-form generation tasks. In this talk, I will argue that many existing evaluation paradigms are poorly matched to the retrieval-augmented, long-form generation settings in which LLMs are now deployed. Using examples from recent work on model refusal and expert evaluation, I will illustrate how automated metrics and LLM-judges can fail to capture…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Architecture Hall (ARC). Campus room: ARC G070. Accessibility Contact: Deb Nelson, nelsod6@uw.edu, 206-685-9323. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, February 12, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Winter Career Panel - Academia Focus
Biostats program alumni working in academia will share their career journeys, impressions from their time in the program, and, where possible, insight into PhD admissions in their departments.
Panelists: Anna Plantinga, Associate Professor at Williams College , Charles Wolock, Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, University of Rochester , Manisha Desai, Kim and Ping Li Professor, Associate Dean of Research, Section Chief of Biostatistics, Director of the Quantitative Sciences Unit at Stanford , Taylor Okonek, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Macalester College.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: N/A, Zoom link will be sent to registered attendees. Accessibility Contact: Maggie Tarnawa. Event Types: Information Sessions. Target Audience: School of Public Health and Statistics/Data Science-focused graduate students.
Friday, February 13, 2026, 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM.
Zoom.
UW Biostatistics & Fred Hutch Prentice Lecture: Evolving Designs and Analyses of Publicly Funded Cancer Clinical Trials
Speaker: Michael LeBlanc, PhD, Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington; Professor Biostatistics Program, Fred Hutch Cancer Center
Title: Evolving Designs and Analyses of Publicly Funded Cancer Clinical Trials
Abstract: Publicly funded cancer clinical trials are essential for evaluating new therapies and defining standards of care for relevant patient populations. Over the past two decades, trial design and analysis have evolved significantly, both broadly and within the SWOG collaborative group. Therapies targeting specific patient subgroups, as well as broadly efficacious immunotherapies, have led to meaningful improvements in patient survival, but have also introduced new challenges for trial design and interpretation.I will use examples from the SWOG Cancer Research Network to highlight strategies for designing and analyzing these trials. I will also describe the experience and promise of newer data collection strategies, as well as the interpretation of treatment effects in settings with…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: William H. Foege Genome Sciences (GNOM). Campus room: GNOM S060. Accessibility Contact: Deb Nelson, nelsod6@uw.edu, 206-685-9323. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, February 19, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Biostatistics Seminar: Debiased Machine Learning Meets Shape Constraints: Modern Inference on Monotone Functions
Speaker: Marco Carone, PhD, Professor and Interim Associate Chair, Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington
Title: Debiased Machine Learning Meets Shape Constraints: Modern Inference on Monotone Functions
Abstract: Coming soon.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Hans Rosling Center for Population Health (HRC). Campus room: HRC 155. Accessibility Contact: Deb Nelson, nelsod6@uw.edu, 206-685-9323. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, February 26, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Biostatistics Seminar: Fast diagonal single-cell multi-omics integration with self-mapping
Speaker: Leying Guan, PhD, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Yale University
Presentation: Fast diagonal single-cell multi-omics integration with self-mapping
Abstract: The integration of “diagonal” single-cell multi-omics data—where distinct modalities (for example, RNA and protein) are measured in different cells and in disjoint feature spaces—remains a major challenge in computational biology. Unlike horizontal integration, diagonal datasets provide neither cell–cell correspondences nor reliable shared features, requiring cross-modal alignment under modality-specific measurement processes. Existing approaches therefore often rely on curated or inferred feature links together with mutual nearest-neighbor search to define anchor correspondences, but these anchors can be unreliable under weak linkage and the matching step can be computationally burdensome at atlas scale. Here we introduce SCALEMAP, a fast, modality-agnostic integration method based on self-mapping that avoids computationally expensive…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Virtual Seminar. Accessibility Contact: Deb Nelson, nelsod6@uw.edu, 206-685-9323. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, March 5, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Final Exam - Gabriela Vasconcelos
Committee: Ali Shojaie (chair), Patrick Danaher, Li Hsu, Jon Wakefield, Sanjay Srivatsan (GSR)
Presentation: Statistical Methods for Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Data
Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics technologies enable the measurement of gene expression within intact tissues, providing unprecedented opportunities to study spatially organized biological processes. However, the spatial structure of these data introduces statistical challenges that are not adequately addressed by existing methods. In particular, spatial correlation can induce spurious signals in downstream analyses, leading to inflated false positives, biased effect estimates, and misleading interpretations of gene regulation and differential expression. This dissertation develops statistical methodology to understand and account for spatial dependence, with a focus on differential expression and gene–gene association analyses in spatially resolved data.
The first project develops methods for within-sample differential expression that…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Hans Rosling Center for Population Health (HRC). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/93900910631?pwd=1xnS6Aa8IoWPfEdsPbEKOldinvUTIh.1. Campus room: HRC 370. Accessibility Contact: Deb Nelson, nelsod6@uw.edu, 206-685-9323. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, March 6, 2026, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Biostatistics Seminar: Li Hsu, PhD, Professor, Biostatistics Program, Fred Hutch Cancer Center; Affiliate Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington
Speaker: Li Hsu, PhD, Professor, Biostatistics Program, Fred Hutch Cancer Center; Affiliate Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington
Presentation title and abstract coming soon.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Architecture Hall (ARC). Campus room: ARC G070. Accessibility Contact: Deb Nelson, nelsod6@uw.edu, 206-685-9323. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, March 12, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
Biostatistics Seminar: Five lessons for target gene identification in the post-GWAS era
Speaker: Boxiang Liu, PhD, Presidential Young Professor,Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences & Department of Biomedical Informatics, National University of Singapore; Principal Research Scientist, Genome Institute of Singapore, A*STAR
Title: Five lessons for target gene identification in the post-GWAS era
Abstract: Despite over a million risk variants identified by genome-wide association studies (GWAS), translating these associations into therapeutic insights remains a bottleneck in genomic medicine. In this talk, I present five critical lessons from post-GWAS research that collectively advance our ability to pinpoint disease-relevant target genes. Using large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing across diverse Asian populations and gene-by-intervention studies, we highlight the significance of cell-type-specific QTLs, ancestry-driven genetic insights, and context-dependent gene regulation. Our systematic benchmarking of over gene implication methods shows that ensemble approaches and adaptive…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Virtual Seminar. Accessibility Contact: Deb Nelson, nelsod6@uw.edu, 206-685-9323. Event Types: Academics.
Thursday, March 19, 2026, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.