Alejandra Avalos-Pacheco, PhD Wins 2020 Savage Award

Alejandra Avalos-Pacheco, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Lorenzo Trippa lab and the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science (HiTS) within the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science (CRS), has won the 2020 International Society of Bayesian Analysis Savage Award. The Savage Award, named for pioneering statistician Leonard J. Savage, recognizes two out-standing doctoral dissertations in Bayesian econometrics and statistics, one each in Theory & Methods and Applied Methodology.

Dr. Avalos-Pacheco won in the category Applied Methodology for her PhD thesis on“Factor regression for dimensionality reduction and data integration techniques with applications to cancer data.” She defended her thesis on March 2019 at the University of Warwick as part of her PhD studies in the joint Oxford-Warwick PhD program on Big Data, and was supervised by Richard Savage (University of Warwick) and David Rossell (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). “My thesis develops a practical solution to address heterogenous high-dimensional data integration using Bayesian techniques, while also offering practical foundational and computational developments,”  says Dr. Avalos-Pacheco. “ My results show that batch effects and data integration are practically-relevant in cancer genomics and applies the methodology to ovarian, lung and pancreatic datasets.”

Congratulations, Dr. Avalos-Pacheco!