Congratulations to Hélène Ruffieux from the MRC Biostatistics Unit on being awarded the Young Biometrician Award for 2021.

Hélène received the award for her paper “A global-local approach for detecting hotspots in multiple-response regression” with co-authors Anthony C. Davison, Jorg Hager, Jamie Inshaw, Benjamin P. Fairfax, Sylvia Richardson and Leonardo Bottolo, published in The Annals of Applied Statistics. The judges said the paper offered a mathematically impressive, tractable analytic approximation to Bayesian inference in the difficult, high-dimensional problem of hotspot detection in statistical genetics, and demonstrated clear improvements over existing approaches. The works combines novel methodological contributions in both model specification and inference, and the judges expressed their admiration for the paper’s combination of technical sophistication and practical utility.

The Young Biometrician Award is co-sponsored by the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society and the Fisher Memorial Trust. The judges have also awarded Richard Glennie from the University of St Andrews. Hélène has received a certificate and cash prize, and will present her work at a future scientific meeting of the British & Irish Region.

Hélène said:

This award is an excellent recognition of our efforts to make the inference of hotspots robust and practical in hierarchical sparse regression settings. I am eager to see further advances in this field, which will also contribute to increasing the reproducibility of genetic association findings.