SDS Seminar Series – Rafael Irizarry, Harvard University

The Fall 2024 SDS Seminar Series concludes on November 15th from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. with Dr. Rafael Irizarry (Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard University). This event is in-person in WEL 3.502.

Title: Twenty-Five Years of Data Science: Music, Genomics, and Public Health Surveillance

Abstract: In this talk I will describe three examples of Statistics in action, from different application areas. The first example relates to the analysis of musical sound signals. I will describe how locally harmonic models can be used to provide meaningful parameters useful for manipulation of sounds. The second example relates to my current research in spatial transcriptomics. I will describe how biological discoveries can be enabled by genomics technology, exploratory data analysis, and statistical reasoning. Specifically, I will describe how relatively simple statistical techniques can greatly improve cell annotation, clustering, and detection of spatially varying genes. Finally, I will describe how we estimated excess mortality after hurricane María and how this motivated collaborations during the COVID-19 pandemic.