This Year’s Winner: Dr. Brian Caffo, PhD

The Department of Biostatistics is pleased to announce that Dr. Brian Caffo, PhD is the winner of the 2023 L. Adrienne Cupples Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Service in Biostatistics.

Dr. Caffo will visit BUSPH to receive the award and give a presentation on:

Thursday, April 6, 2023
12:00 – 1:00 pm, Hiebert and Zoom 

Presentation on AI for organoids and organoids for AI

In this talk, we will discuss unsupervised methods for studying brain organoids and functional neural systems. Particularly, we consider the important role that parsimony can play in non-parsimonious decompositions and non-linear embeddings. We consider a study of neurogenesis including in vivo, in vitro, single cell and bulk RNA sequencing. We contrast several methods for joint decompositions that share information across experiment and tissue types and contrast results in novel experiments not used in model training.

We will conclude with a discussion of the role that in vitro neural systems can play in performing AI tasks. In this, we use multi-electrode arrays (MEAs) to study functioning brain organoids. Such use of organoids for biocomputing is a nascent and exciting field that we refer to as organoid intelligence. We discuss recent organization efforts on forming a community of researchers in organoid intelligence.

Purpose of the Award

This annual award recognizes a biostatistician whose academic achievements reflect the contributions to teaching, research, and service exemplified by Professor L. Adrienne Cupples.  Dr. Cupples joined the faculty at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) in 1981 and later served as founding Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Co-Executive Director of the Graduate Program in Biostatistics. During her tenure at BUSPH, she advanced the field of biostatistics through extensive publications in major journals and book chapters on collaborative and methodological research, development and effective teaching of a wide range of biostatistics courses, and mentorship of numerous graduate students and faculty.