STAT Madness Celebrates Innovative Research—Your Vote Matters!
Every March you may be among those who complete the brackets for women’s and men’s college basketball teams competing for bragging rights as the best of the best. Well, did you know there’s a scientific version of this style of competition, called STAT Madness?
Follow this link to cast your vote. You can cast a vote each day through March 15!
Established by STAT News, STAT Madness aims to find the nation's most innovative biomedical scientific discovery of 2023. And Einstein has a research team still competing in this year's STAT Madness contest! You can learn about them and their competitors by viewing STAT Madness 2024 Contenders.
Your Vote Can Help
Drs. Xingxing Zang and Deyou Zheng are still in the thick of STAT Madness. Your votes (one daily through March 15) can help them reach the next round of competition!
Teams from institutions around the country strive to get as many votes as they can to advance through several rounds, with the ultimate goal of making it to the championship round for a final win. Now entering the second round and vying for a chance to compete in the third (of five total rounds) are our own Xingxing Zang, Ph.D., and Deyou Zheng, Ph.D., who used a novel bioinformatics approach to identify cells called cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) in a type of brain tumor called as glioblastoma, finding that increased CAF abundance correlates with higher tumor grades and worse clinical outcomes.
Their discovery, which was published in Clinical Cancer Research, is paired against the work of a research team from University of California Irvine. And we each can do our part to help them reach the next level!
Winners are chosen by supporters who sign up and vote on their favorites. Voting daily is permissible, so consider giving our Einstein colleagues a leg up on their competition.
To vote, you must create a free account and then log in. Second-round voting ends at midnight on Friday, March 15! So, let’s rally around our STAT Madness team to help get them to the third round! (Last year, Evripidis Gavathiotis, Ph.D., represented a team that advanced to the championship!)
Helpful Reminders Worth Sharing
If you’re on social media, you may have noticed our communications and public affairs team has posted about the competition and may post again—retweets and reposts are encouraged!—all in an effort to remind people to vote daily for our Einstein team!
While we continue to root for Xingxing and Deyou, congratulations also are in order for Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, Ph.D., and Margaret Kielian, Ph.D., who each had discoveries competing in the competition’s first round. All our researchers do Einstein proud with their innovative investigations that offer promising progress in addressing issues affecting human health.
Posted on: Wednesday, March 13, 2024