Biostatistics Symposium of Southern California 2026
The Biostatistics Symposium (of Southern California (BSSC) was held on February 22–23, 2026, in Newport Beach, bringing together faculty, trainees, and researchers from across the region to share recent developments in biostatistics and related fields.
Faculty from our department actively contributed to the scientific program through invited and contributed talks. Presentations included Xiaoqian Liu, “Transfer learning for survival-based clustering of predictors with an application to TP53 mutation annotation”; Jeffrey Zhang, “CiteSure: Recurrent retrieval-augmented large language models for faithful biomedical citation recommendation”; Salil Koner, “Integrative dynamic prediction of Parkinson’s disease using multivariate functional joint models”; Yuzhou Chen, “LLM-based multi-agent systems and simplicial self-supervised learning models for regional cancer prevalence estimation using satellite imagery”; and Suqi Liu, “Representation learning to advance knowledge integration in health sciences”. Collectively, these talks highlighted the department’s engagement with a broad range of methodological and applied research topics.
Graduate students from our department were well represented in the poster session, with two students receiving conference awards. Brian Neal (“Modeling hospitalization and mortality using multilevel time-varying joint models: A spline-based EM framework”) received one of the Best Statistical Analysis Awards, and Chin-Sheng Teng (“An expectation–maximization algorithm for multivariate genome-wide association studies (EMmvGWAS)”) received the Best Visualization Award. These recognitions reflect the strength of student research in the department and the role of the poster session as a venue for presenting and discussing ongoing work.
Members of our department also contributed to the organization of the symposium. Esra Kurum chaired the Poster Committee and coordinated the poster review process and conference awards. Alfonso Landeros served as a poster judge and member of the Poster Committee. Xinping Cui served on the Academic Organizing Committee, continuing her longstanding involvement with BSSC and the Southern California biostatistics community, including her prior service as President of the ASA Orange County–Long Beach Chapter.
Overall, BSSC 2026 provided a valuable opportunity for scholarly exchange and professional engagement within the Southern California biostatistics community.
Department summary contributed by Esra Kurum