Congratulations to Nirupama Tamvada, the recipient of the Rick White Award for the UBC academic year 2022.
Nirupama has had the opportunity to work on fruitful collaborations related to biomedical data. She worked in collaboration with the CANSII CRT research team to develop a methodology for analyzing high-dimensional survival data with multiple events. This can be applied to genomics data to identify genes that are associated with the rate of patient survival, and to predict a patient’s risk over time. As a part of this collaboration, she worked on contributing to the development of two R packages.
Nirupama also worked as an intern at BC Cancer for her co-op term, where she contributed to the development of an R package for analyzing shallow-whole genome sequencing data. In particular, she developed a sample quality tool for shallow whole-genome sequencing data that is a part of this R package, which will help to streamline the analysis of shallow whole-genome sequencing data. She additionally worked as a Statistician intern at Broadstreet, and assisted pharmaceutical clients in the analysis of their data. She also worked as a Junior Statistical Consultant with Applied Statistics and Data Science Group (ASDa).
Nirupama is currently in the process of finishing her Master's degree to graduate in August, and was supervised by Professor Gabriela V. Cohen Freue.
About the Rick White Award
The Rick White Award recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in statistical science through collaboration with investigators in another discipline on a substantial application. The award honours the memory of Rick White, who served the department and the university with his gifts in Applied Statistics.
A two-time UBC alumnus, Rick received his Bachelor of Science with a major in Mathematics in 1990 and his Master of Science in Statistics in 1992. He began his career assisting Professor John Petkau as a consultant for the Statistical Consulting and Research Laboratory, eventually moving up to the role of Managing Director of what is now the Department’s Applied Statistics and Data Science Group. Rick passed away on September 2, 2016, leaving a hole in our department and in our hearts.
To learn more about or to support the Rick White Memorial Fund, see Rick White’s In Memoriam page.