Siying (Sydney) Ma Selected as a Trainee Under the STAGE Program.

STAGE British Columbia is pleased to announce that Siying Ma has been selected as a STAGE Trainee with her project, “Scientific Machine Learning for Biostatistics: A Perspective on Functional and Epidemiological Modeling”

Siying is currently a PhD student in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University.  Her research is conducted under the supervision of Dr. Lloyd Elliott  and Dr. Jiguo Cao, with mentorship from Dr. Lin Zhang through the STAGE progrm

Before embarking on her doctoral journey, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Statistics from East China Normal University and a Master of Science in Statistics from University of Victoria where she was awarded a NSERC Visual and Automated Disease Analytics (VADA) Graduate Scholarship.

Siying has previously made contributions in developing statistical models to estimate the total number of COVID-19 infections (including cases that were not reported or recorded) using individual-level serveillance data containing information on diagnostic testing and hospitalization.  Her current research focuses on the need for interdisciplinary models to address complex health challenges, particularly when working with limited or noisy real-world data.

Her STAGE project aims to integrate the flexibility of machine learning with the rigor and interpretability of statistics, enabling translational innovation in epidemiology and statistical genetics.

STAGE is proud to support Siying in her research endeavors and looks forward to her contributions in supporting real-world applications in disease prediction, dynamics inference and underreporting estimation.