The Department of Statistics wants to wish congratulations to Max Russo and his collaborator Macarius Donneyong, Associate Professor in the Colleges of Pharmacy and Public Health, on their project being selected for funding through the 2025-26 Arts and Sciences Natural and Mathematical Sciences Exploration Grant program!

Their innovative research focuses on developing an agentic AI framework to detect adverse drug events within healthcare databases. To manage the combinatorial explosion of drug interactions in polypharmacy, the team will pursue two key advancements. First, they will build a Bayesian factor regression model that utilizes group structures to borrow information across similar therapeutic classes, significantly improving risk estimation accuracy. Second, they will focus on approximate inference via Variational Bayes and/or parameter pre-estimation to ensure the model scales efficiently for the high-dimensional setting inherent in polypharmacy adverse event reporting.