Eric F. Lock

Co-expression-wide association studies link genetically regulated interactions with complex traits - Nature Communications Proteins can affect traits through their interactions with one another. Here, the authors propose the COWAS method to identify pairs of interacting genes or proteins whose genetically regulated co-exp...

My second dissertation paper is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! Here we introduce the co-expression-wide association study (COWAS) method for identifying pairs of genes or proteins whose genetically regulated co-expression is associated with complex traits. 🧵⬇️

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A screenshot of my JSM 2025 Agenda Chat bot, featuring the answer to "when is Mitchell O'Hara-Wild presenting".

There's so many parallel sessions at #JSM2025 that it's hard to choose where to go, so I web-scraped the schedule and made a chatbot to help.

I've made it public, so hopefully it can help you too - try it out 👉 shiny.mitchelloharawild.com/jsm2025/

Yesterday I successfully defended my dissertation! It feels surreal to finally reach the end of my PhD journey at @umnsph.bsky.social. Thank you to my adviser Wei Pan and to my committee members @elock.bsky.social, @aazaidi.bsky.social, and Thierry Chekouo for your invaluable mentorship and support!

I'm excited to present my work on rigorous and scalable multiple-testing corrections for complex haplotype scans in WGS at ASA STATGEN 2025!
t.co/rv205OBCs1

I am at StatGen 2025 in Minneapolis. I would be happy to chat with students or postdocs about research or career questions. Send me a DM.

I'm excited to share our latest work, now out in #PLOSGenetics! If you feel limited by linear models in TWAS or PWAS but don't think you can switch to nonlinear methods due to a lack of individual-level phenotype data, this paper is for you.

🔗 journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

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School of Public Health Assistant Professor Jared Huling receives McKnight Presidential Fellow Award - School of Public Health - University of Minnesota University of Minnesota (UMN) School of Public Health (SPH) Assistant Professor Jared Huling is a recipient of the prestigious McKnight Presidential

So proud of my colleague @jaredhuling.bsky.social for being named a McKnight Presidential Fellow! I'm thrilled to have him as a colleague and look forward to the great things he'll do in the future!

Within-trial data borrowing for sequential multiple assignment randomized trials Summary. The Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) is a complex trial design that involves randomizing a single participant multiple time

Excited to share new research from my former student Ales Kotalik, along with David Vock, Brian Hobbs, and Nancy Sherwood. Here we discuss how dynamic borrowing methods developed for precision oncology can also be used to improve efficiency in a SMART.

F mechanisms (New and Competitive renewals)

Oof!

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Congratulations to Leif Verace from the University of Minnesota, the 2025 ENAR Van Ryzin Student Paper Award winner! ⭐️

NIH Reporter data through this morning (grants funded up to March 8th)

First, new and competitive renewal grants...

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A headshot of Sandra Safo with the tagline "Celebrating Black History Month"

Celebrating Black History Month: Initially drawn to combining math and finance, Sandra Safo's path shifted after she discovered data analysis during her studies. Sandra now develops innovative statistical and machine learning methods to advance health care research. magazine.amstat.org/...

Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

STATGEN 2025: Conference on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics - Events Calendar - School of Public Health - University of Minnesota

Interested in #statistics in #genomics and #genetics? Join us May 21-23 in Minneapolis for the 2nd annual STATGEN Conference for the ASA's Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics. Registration and abstract submission (deadline February 15th) are open to all.
www.sph.umn.edu/events-calen...

Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring Researchers facing

“The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating.” scim.ag/40ureTO

BAMITA: Bayesian multiple imputation for tensor arrays Abstract. Data increasingly take the form of a multi-way array, or tensor, in several biomedical domains. Such tensors are often incompletely observed. For

Introducing BAMITA: Bayesian Multiple Imputation for Tensor Arrays! Simulate realistic values for missing data in tensors. Applied to longitudinal microbiome data. With PhD student extraordinaire Ziren Jiang, & Gen Li from the "other" U of M. In Biostatistics and on arXiv.
doi.org/10.1093/bios...

For estimating low-rank signal in a matrix:
-Nuclear norm (NN) penalization over-shrinks when the signal-to-noise ratio is high 🙁,
-Hard thresholding (HT) the singular values over-fits when the signal-to-noise ratio is low 😲,
-But an empirical variational Bayes (EVB) approach is just right 😎.

Empirical Bayes linked matrix decomposition - Machine Learning Data for several applications in diverse fields can be represented as multiple matrices that are linked across rows or columns. This is particularly common in molecular biomedical research, in which m...

Introducing EV-BIDIFAC - decompose low-rank signal across linked matrices efficiently with a model-based framework & no tuning parameters! Reviewer 2 *raves* "my primary concerns have been addressed with this revision". Available now at Machine Learning and arXiv! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Careers Required qualifications:Applicants must have a PhD in biostatistics, statistics, or a closely related field, by the start of appointment and a strong interest in collaborative research with biomedical investigators across the health sciences.

Trying again with a working link:

We’ve just posted a new Contract Assistant Professor position at UMN Biostat & Health Data Science! Happy to discuss with anyone interested.

#biostatistics #healthdatascience #academicjobs

hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/365...