On behalf of WNAR and the WNAR Award Committee, we would like to congratulate Marc Suchard as the recipient of the 2026 WNAR Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship. Congratulations, Dr. Suchard!
The WNAR of the IBS Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship was established in 2021 to recognize an individual or a team, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or citizenship, who has made a significant impact on our society through service and/or research in development and application of statistical, mathematical, and data science theory and methods in the biomedical and environmental sciences. For example, awardees may be individuals or team whose research and/or service in biometrics has made a direct impact on serving underrepresented communities, promoting social justice, addressing environmental issues, or transforming scientific practice, and can comprise either a single contribution of extraordinary merit or an outstanding aggregate of contributions.
Dr. Marc Suchard is Professor, Departments of Biomathematics, Biostatistics and Human Genetics at University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Suchard is a world leader in statistical computing and Bayesian inference, with significant contributions to phylogenetics, epidemic modeling, bioinformatics, and health informatics. He is specifically recognized for his work expanding Bayesian methods and applications for phylogeny, his contribution to health policy and informatics through the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Initiative, and his work in software development of impactful tools such as MrBayes, BEAST, and BEAGLE. WNAR is very proud of its outstanding members, represented by Dr. Suchard.
Congratulations as well to our other nominees, all of whom were outstanding and highly impressive in their contributions.
As a recipient of the award, Dr. Suchard gave a talk in the WNAR Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the JSM on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, 8:30am. More information about the lecture can be found below.
WNAR members, please plan to submit nomination materials for next year’s award in Fall 2026. We look forward to recognizing our outstanding members with this honor. More information about the award process and upcoming deadlines can be found on the WNAR award website.
WNAR Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the JSM
Session 1414, Tuesday, August 4, 2026, 8:30AM-10:20AM
Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center
Room: CC-258A
Title: Inference for discrete-valued stochastic processes in infectious diseases
Speaker: Dr. Marc Suchard (University of California, Los Angeles)
Abstract: Bayesian computation remains onerous at scale for inference under many discrete-valued stochastic process-based models, while these statistical models remain ubiquitous across biology and public health. In this talk, I will explore how one can construct high-performance samplers for flexible continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) models. CTMCs underpin the most popular models for learning about how rapidly evolving pathogens change over time and space to give rise to human infection, and the dimensionality of these problems are daunting. These approaches enable the introduction of novel non-parametric CTMC models with Gaussian process priors that capture biological realism previously missing. Applied to the analysis of early SARS-CoV-2 and Yellow Fever virus (YFV) genomes, such flexible models remove bias in inference of the location and timing of the SARS-CoV-2 split-over into humans and identify the non-linear effect of temperature on YFV spread in South America, while the statistical machinery is over an order of magnitude more time efficient than conventional approaches.
More information about the award and past awardees can be found on the award’s website.
