Abstract

Statistics Graduate Student Research Day is an annual one day conference organized by the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto (DOSS) and the Statistics Graduate Students Union (SGSU). Research Day, first organized in 2009, is specically aimed at the graduate students of the DOSS or of any department who are interested in statistical research. It exposes them to current research areas and methods in the field of statistics, and introduces them to leading experts. It provides anacademic forum where they can present, discuss and receive feedback on their research from peers, faculty, and the invited guests; DOSS graduate students are invited to give a talk and a research poster competition also takes place. The 2020 edition of Research Day will focus on applications of Data Science in Life Sciences, Genetics and Genomics. Not long ago, sequencing an entire genome determining the order of all 3 billion pairs of DNA letters in the helix took years. The Human Genome Project, the first completed sequence of an entire human genome, took around 13 years from conception to its completion in 2003, and cost more than 2 billion. Today, next-generation sequencing can do the same thing in 24 hours for not much more than a thousand pounds. This has completely changed how scientists work. It-s not just that they get their hands dirty less often, nor simply that the required skills have changed. It-s that the whole process of science how you come by an idea and test it has been upended. More recent discoveries have come from even larger data sets and more complex analysisfar beyond the capacity of even so dedicated a scientist as Mendel, or of any human being in a single lifetime for that matter. Today, the ability to compile those massive sets of data and to develop methods to find the statistical relationships within them is entirely in the hands of data scientists using ever more advanced DNA sequencers and ever more powerful computers. All the speakers invited are brilliant data scientists working at the frontier of Biomedical research. Their work tackles difficult statistical and computational problems that are encountered in the scientic exploration of the human genome.