Eight Researchers Named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Associate Professor
Department of Statistics
Schoolof Arts and Sciences, Rutgers-New Brunswick
Codirector, Rutgers University Genetics Coordinating Center

For distinguished contributions to the field of statistical genetics, particularly in multi-cohort human genetics projects and in neurological and psychiatric disorders

Breast cancer. Pulmonary hypertension. Kidney disease. Because Steve Buyske conducts research into all those illnesses and many more, you might assume his field is in the health sciences.

Buyske, in fact, has been a professor of statistics at Rutgers for nearly three decades. But his expertise in a field focused on analyzing and interpreting data has led to a long and fruitful series of collaborations with scientists from many fields, particularly genetics, that seek to solve some of humankind's most intractable health problems.

By his own reckoning, Buyske has collaborated on projects and coauthored studies with more than 1,000 scientists. Today, he finds himself in ever more demand.

"It started with somebody contacting me with an interesting problem," Buyske said. "Then they tell their friends or collaborators, and you just get pulled along. For me, it's a tremendous privilege to work with all these people and to learn about what they're working on."

In a world swimming in data, the role of statistics is increasingly vital. That is especially true in the biological sciences where technical advances such as genomic sequencing produce large, complex data sets.

"The kind of data that we could get in 1998 is profoundly different than what we have now," Buyske said. "When we study genetics, it's not just the genes, it's all sorts of other measures: how the genes are expressed, the protein levels, the metabolites in your blood." One of his current projects is a breast cancer study with the genetics department that has enrolled nearly 20,000 people who mailed in their saliva samples and medical information. He is also a senior researcher with the federally funded Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) study, a project that has conducted studies on some 70,000 individuals with non-European ancestry, producing new knowledge on complex genetic traits among underrepresented populations.

The role of statistics in such large-scale studies is critical, particularly detecting important patterns in the data while ruling out others that are just randomly occurring phenomena.

"Humans are really good at seeing patterns, but sometimes there's nothing actually going on," Buyske said. "Statistics brings 150 years of methodology to keep you from fooling yourself."

Receiving an AAAS fellowship is particularly meaningful for Buyske. He joined the association as a member at 18, served as an intern at the institution during his undergraduate years and has been reading its flagship journal Science for decades.

"After years of having it showing up in my mailbox, this feels particularly thrilling," he said.

- John Chadwick