Keynote Speaker

Abdus S Wahed, PhD:  Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology

University of Rochester, USA & ASA Representative 

Biography:  Dr. Abdus S. Wahed is Professor and the Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the University of Rochester. Prior to assuming this role in 2023, he spent over 20 years as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also served as the Director of the PhD Graduate Program in Biostatistics for nine years. He has been teaching statistics to graduate and undergraduate students at different institutions for over 30 years. Dr. Wahed’s primary research focuses on statistical methods for Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (SMART) and dynamic treatment regimes. He has published over 130 papers in top statistics and clinical journals, including JASA, Biometrics, Biometrika, Biostatistics, JRSS-C, Statistics in Medicine, and Lifetime Data Analysis. He has delivered over 110 invited presentations to national and international conferences or institutions. For his contribution to research in Biostatistics, Dr. Wahed received the ASA Pittsburgh Chapter Statistician of the Year Award in 2014. He was inducted as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2015, an honor acknowledging his significant advancements in statistics and biostatistics, particularly in the field of treatment sequencing.

Dr. Wahed has previously served as the President of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA), as the Vice-Chair of the Committee on International Relations in Statistics of ASA, and as the Chair of the COPSS Award Committee of the Committee of the Presidents of Statistical Societies.  He is currently an Associate Editor of Biometrics, Biostatistics, and the Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice. For more details: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/biostat/people/faculty/abdus-wahed-phd

Research Interests: Personalized medicine - development of statistical methods for testing dynamic treatment regimes (adaptive treatment strategies) from Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (SMARTs) or similarly structured observational data. Other methodological research interest includes multivariate ordinal longitudinal data analysis, survival analysis in the presence of misclassified events, analysis of variance for censored survival data, causal inference, semiparametric inference, and joint modeling of longitudinal and time-to-event data measured with error. Collaborative research interests include sequential treatment decisions in depression treatment, obesity and weight loss, liver diseases such as hepatitis B and C, and cancer treatment. 

Keynote Speaker

Taesung Park, PhD: Professor, Department of Statistics, Seoul National University, South Korea 

Biography: Taesung Park received his M.S. degree in Statistics from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1986, and received his Ph.D. degree in Biostatistics from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in 1990. From August 1991 to August 1992, he worked as a visiting research scientist at the National Institutes of Health, USA. From September 2002 to August 2003, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. From September 2009 to August 2010, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington, USA. He served as the Chair of the Bioinformatics Program, Seoul National University (SNU) from April 2005 to March 2008 and the Chair of the Department of Statistics of SNU from September 2007 and August 2009. He is currently the Professor and Director for the National Creative Research Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at the Department of Statistics, SNU, Korea. For more details: https://stat.snu.ac.kr/en/snu__professor/%EB%B0%95%ED%83%9C%EC%84%B1

Research Interests: DNA microarray data analysis, gene-gene interaction analysis, and statistical genetics.