Each year, the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) fellowship is awarded to doctoral students in recognition of their academic excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) achievements. We are proud to announce that of the 7,942 applications received this year, our students, Seth Temple and Andrea Boskovic, have been selected to receive the 2021 NDSEG fellowship award.
Seth is a second year Ph.D. student advised by Professor Sharon Browning. He received his B.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Oregon in 2019. He is currently studying statistical methods that make use of the correlation structure induced by genetic recombination events.
“I am generally interested in developing computationally efficient statistical methods for and inspired by biological processes. This year I have been applying these methods to identify genetic variants important to Alzheimer’s pathology. As a 2020 summer intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I developed models to assess the risks that Culex mosquitos pose to the spread of West Nile virus.” Seth says. “Some of my previous work is ongoing, but I am now shifting towards my dissertation project. I will be developing an inferential framework to study natural selection in human populations. This research may uncover insights into how our species has responded to environmental and anthropogenic pressures in the recent two thousand years.”
Andrea Boskovic is a first year incoming Ph.D. student who will start her program in our department in Autumn 2021. She will be graduating from Amherst College with a B.S. degree in Mathematics and Statistics.
“I’m currently writing a thesis in statistics about imbalanced data classification with neural networks and classifiers. I’m very excited about all the interesting research happening at UW, but I’m especially interested in machine learning research with applications in biology,” says Andrea.
The NDSEG fellowship program is sponsored by the Air Force office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the Office of the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering. This program is administered by the Systems Plus, Inc.