Dr. Gary G. Sackett Awards

Allison’s research investigates the computing skills necessary for graduate students in the biological and environmental sciences to implement statistics for research in their fields. The volume and variety of data collected by researchers in the biological sciences for statistical analysis continues to increase at a rapid pace, but the computational preparation of graduate students lags behind. Allison's research identifies the key skills these graduate students are using in their research to implement statistics and uses this knowledge to develop a suite of statistical computing workshops. These workshops aid in alleviating the computational burden these students face and provide campus-wide resources for incorporating data science into the classroom. Through the Gary G. Sackett Fellowship, Allison was able to continue her work on her Ph.D. dissertation. In the summer of 2019, Allison was able to prepare a manuscript, detailing the development and implementation of the suite of workshops, for submission in the Journal of Statistics Education.

I attended and presented both an invited poster session and an interactive breakout session at the United States Conference on Teach Statistics 2019 (USCOTS19) in State College, PA from May 14th through May 20th.  During the poster presentation, I was able to present my findings to a group of educators interested in similar research areas allowing me to develop future academic plans, and gain insight on what others are doing in this field.  The breakout session allowed me to continue my communications skills, educate on findings regarding pre-service teachers, and interact with others interested specifically on this topic to gain multiple perspectives on the research at hand.

Chris’ dissertation involves developing statistical methodology to construct clinical endpoints with increased sensitivity to detect slight changes in disease severity in longitudinal data, motivated by collaboration with Dr. Mark Greenwood from Montana State University and Dr. Bibiana Bielekova at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who are interested in creating a better clinical endpoint for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients. The development of a better outcome scale for patients with MS is important because testing efficacy of treatments in progressive MS using the current scale utilized by the FDA (Expanded Disability Status Scale, EDSS) requires hundreds of patients being followed for 2-3 years, creating a bottleneck for testing efficacy of progressive MS drugs. Through the Gary G. Sackett Fellowship, Chris finalized a dissertation proposal, which he defended and passed on September 18th, 2017.

 

Tony’s researching pairwise particle interactions that result in spherical self-assembly.  Examples of which include bacterial colonies, micelles, vesicles, viral capsids and patchy particles.  Recent work by James von Brecht and David Uminsky (2016) investigated the role anisotropy, or directional dependence, plays in these interactions.  His research is a continuation of their results and an exploration of patterned equilibrium states.  Summer of 2018, he was awarded the Gary G. Sackett Fellowship.  The support of the fellowship allowed me to make significant progress in his PhD dissertation draft, which he plan to defend later this term.  I'd like to thank Dr. Sackett for his contribution.

 

The summer fellowship in 2018 allowed Tan for his continued work on his Ph.D. dissertation, which consists of creating new methodology in researching constrained monothetic clustering. An application of the method to the Arctic ice extent area functional data to detect underlying ice structure over the years and the evaluation of the method with a simulation study was also done during that time. Together, they shaped two chapters in his dissertation and got him ready for the proposal defense at the end of that year. The fellowship also allowed Tan the opportunity to present his research at the Joint Statistical Meeting, an annual largest gathering of statisticians worldwide, in Baltimore, MD. At the conference, he presented a SPEED poster format and had the opportunity to receive helpful feedback to improve his research as well as socialize and extend his professional network.

Adam Wilander's research concentrates on understanding collective behavior in biological and social systems.  His work on social systems specifically aims to understand how underlying social networks influence observed opinion dynamics between communities.  Adam then used this to develop an algorithm to extract the underlying community structure from repeated observations of bulk dynamics.  Adam's research in biological systems explored synchronization and desynchronization in varied phenomena such as metabolic oscillations and cell behaviors.  He explored how feedback in these systems changed the possible accessible stable states in these systems. Adam completed his dissertation which he defended in fall 2018.

 

Robin's research interests lie within the field of Topological Data Analysis - understanding the geometric and topological properties of data sets. With the help of the Gary G. Sackett Travel Grant, she was able to attend the Spring School and Conference in Applied and Computational Algebraic Topology at the Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics (HIM) in Bonn, Germany. During that two week period, Robin was able to meet experts within the field, meet other graduate students from the US and Europe, and gain exposure to several different subfields within Applied Algebraic Topology.

Kenneth Flagg (Kenny) is a fifth-year graduate student studying Statistics at Montana State University, Bozeman. Recognized by his department as an Outstanding Graduate Student for the 2017-2018 academic year, Kenny is a well-rounded statistician and a productive researcher.  Kenny has served as a statistician on projects in a variety of application areas including clinical and translational research, mental health, ecology, and environmental risk assessments. These experiences have led to an interest in using statistics to promote healthy relationships between humans and their surrounding environment.  He looks forward to a career developing methodologies with the potential to improve decision-making in these areas.  Through the Gary G. Sackett Award, Kenny was able to travel to the 2018 Joint Statistical Meeting in Vancouver, BC, to give a talk on his research in statistical models for unexploded ordnance remediation.

Eli's research interests and projects lie within the field of both sports statistics and education with a special interest in program development and Graduate Teaching Assistant support. The Gary G. Sackett Travel Grant allowed him the opportunity to attend both the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) and the Cascadia Symposium of Statistics in Sports (CASSIS) in Vancouver, Canada. His sports centered research was presented as a poster at JSM, and an invited talk at CASSIS. Throughout his experiences across the two conferences, he was able to practice different forms of presenting to a variety of audiences, communicate with subject experts in the field of sports to further expand his research, and explore a variety of research areas to help influence future actions and research areas.

Anna's research involves both computational topology and computational geometry. Currently, she is working on exploring shape reconstruction using various topological descriptors such as persistence diagrams or Euler characteristic curves. Through the support of the Gary G. Sackett Travel Grant, she was able to travel to Hungary in the summer of 2018 to participate in the Symposium on Computational Geometry, and in the satellite event Young Researchers Forum, she presented work on curvature estimation of prostate biopsy images. In a continuation of this trip, she was also able to attend a conference in Austria celebrating the work of Herbert Edelsbrunner, a pioneer in topological data analysis. Both of these experiences introduced her to a plethora of potential collaborators and ideas important to her research interests.

Christian's research interests lie within the field of computational Bayesian methods for multivariate non-normal data types. With the help of the Gary G. Sackett Travel Grant, he was able to attend the Joint Statistical Meeting and the Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports, both held in Vancouver, Canada. During that experience, Christian was able to present some of his work, collaborate with other like-minded statisticians, and was exposed new methods to further his research. He would like to thank Dr. Sackett for making that experience possible through his generous contribution.

 

As a research assistant in the Spatial Sciences Lab for the last three years Rachel has gained an interest in remote sensing, GIS and spatial statistics. This has complemented her personal interests in environmentalism and sustainability to form her research interests. She was able to use the Gary G. Sackett Travel Award to attend the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on the Mathematics of Planet Earth in Pittsburgh, PA in the fall of 2018 where she presented work on developing a spectral response for typologies of low-density land use specific to the mountain Northwest region. 

 

Paul is a fourth-year PhD student in Statistics at Montana State.  As a research assistant with the Office of Planning and Analysis in partnership with the Department of Mathematical Sciences, he primarily is interested in development of latent scales related to university research productivity.  In particular, Paul has worked on developing better, data-driven methods for classification of similar groups of doctoral-granting universities.  Using funding from the Gary G. Sackett Award, he was able to travel to Vancouver, B.C. to attend the Joint Statistical Meetings. At JSM, he was able to meet statisticians working in similar research areas and present his research on a new system of university classifications based on model-based clustering of latent factors of research productivity generated by structural equation models.