UW News

October 5, 2011

Two UW public health researchers win NIH Early Independence Awards

UW Health Sciences/UW Medicine

Out of 10 inaugural Early Independence Awards, the National Institutes of Health has granted two to UW School of Public Health researchers. Dr. Daniela Witten, assistant professor of biostatistics, and Nicole Basta, a Ph.D. candidate in epidemiology, have won five-year grants totaling more than $1.5 million each to support their research.

The NIH Early Independence Awards are designed to accelerate the entry of outstanding junior investigators into independent researcher positions. The program is part of an NIH-wide effort to empower the biomedical research workforce by supporting investigators early in their careers, thereby allowing them to leapfrog over the traditional post-doctoral training period. NIH says it wants to capitalize on the “creativity, confidence, and energy” of certain young scientists who have the drive and maturity to flourish independently.

Nicole Basta

Nicole Basta

When Basta, 30, received the news that she had won one of the coveted awards, she was a few weeks shy of receiving her Ph.D. in epidemiology. The award will allow her to pursue a field she is passionate about.

“My interest in infectious diseases goes back many years. Poor health can create so many barriers to achieving ones goal and aspirations. I wanted to work in a field where I could play a role in improving health worldwide. Vaccines are one of the most powerful tools we have to prevent diseases on a global scale,” Basta said.

The grant will support her evaluation of a new vaccine for bacterial meningitis in Mali, which is part of the belt stretching across Africa from Senegal through Ethiopia where the disease has broken out regularly for more than 100 years. The illness has a 10 percent mortality rate. Young children have the highest risk from meningococcal disease, but 60 percent of cases occur in adolescents and adults.

The vaccine was developed specifically for the type of meningitis that primarily affects this area of Africa. Over five years, Basta will study a cohort of people in the capital city, Bamako, who first received the vaccine in December 2010. She will evaluate  the duration of the protection by measuring the persistence of antibodies in each person.

“Traditional postdoctoral work is usually much less independent. You work under the PI [principal investigator] on his or her project,” she said. “This award allows me to lead my own research project and jump starts my career as an epidemiologist.”

Basta and her three sisters are the first generation in her family to attend college. She grew up outside Pittsburgh with parents who “prioritized education above all. They provided a lot of educational enrichment, such as summer classes in the arts and trips to the Carnegie Library. They have always supported me and are very excited about my award.”

She cites Dr. Elizabeth Halloran, professor of biostatistics, as a great mentor to her, and instrumental in getting her to Mali for the first time.

Basta is a research associate with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where she works on infectious diseases. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a bachelors degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, earned her masters degree in epidemiology at the University of Cambridge in England, and is about to receive her doctorate in epidemiology at the UW.  She also spent two years investigating disease outbreaks as a fellow with the Florida Department of Health Epidemic Intelligence Service,

Daniela Witten

Daniela Witten

Based on Wittens biostatistical research, physicians may be able to determine which cases of a disease need to be treated aggressively, or perhaps not at all.

Her project is analyzing “high-dimensional data” – large-scale data coming out of biology that has tens of thousands, even millions, of measurements. DNA sequence data and gene expression data, broadly known as genomics, are examples. Witten develops statistical tools to make sense of such large data sets, tools that might be used to personalize treatment of disease.

For example, not all prostate cancers progress, or they may progress very slowly. It would be extremely valuable to know which cancers will progress and need to be treated, and which will not progress if left untreated. On the basis of standard clinical measurements, it is hard to predict prostate cancer progression accurately. However, a vast amount of genomic data is now available on individuals with prostate cancer. The goal is to develop a statistical algorithm that can use this data to predict whether an individuals prostate cancer will progress.

Witten, 27, grew up in New Jersey in a family of scientists. She planned to major in foreign languages but ended up double-majoring in math and biology.  Then she decided, “My hand-eye coordination was not good enough for lab work as a biologist, but I liked using mathematical tools to answer biology problems.”  As a doctoral candidate in statistics at Stanford University, she found a mentor in  Dr. Robert Tibshirani, professor of statistics and of health research and policy.

“I learned how to think about problems in a different way,” Witten said. “If you are working with researchers in genomics, you are often faced with new and important problems for which there are no pre-existing statistical tools. The challenge is to understand the scientific problem and cast it into an appropriate statistical framework.”

Ultimately, she added, “Its about making use of the available genomic data, and transforming them into knowledge that can inform clinical treatments and increase our base of knowledge.”

Witten is an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics in the UW School of Public Health. She also holds an adjunct appointment in the  Department of Statistics and is an  affiliate investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She received her bachelors degree with honors and distinction in mathematics and biology and a doctorate in statistics from Stanford University. She was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow and was awarded a Genentech Endowed Professorship in Biostatistics 2010-11, as well as the David Byar Young Investigator Award from the American Statistical Association in 2011.