Dr. Will Townes

Biography

Will Townes joined Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in 2022 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in computer science at Princeton University with Barbara Engelhardt. He earned his Ph.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University, where he was advised by Rafael Irizarry. His academic journey began with a focus on tropical ecology, conducting fieldwork in the Philippines, and he subsequently completed an M.S. in mathematics and statistics at Georgetown University while working as a software tester for the EPA. This diverse background has fostered his interest in a wide variety of applications, and he enjoys interdisciplinary collaborations. Townes is an applied statistician primarily working in biomedical and public health domains. He is part of the Delphi research group, focusing on the use of wastewater-based epidemiology and wearable devices to improve infectious disease tracking and forecasting. His research includes the development of normalization, feature selection, and dimension reduction methods for the analysis of single-cell RNA-Seq and spatial transcriptomics, and he has an ongoing commitment to working with experimentalists on statistical method development. His side interests also encompass economics, including international development and finance, and theoretical aspects of Tweedie distributions, paired with a belief in the importance of exploratory data analysis and visualization.

Research Interests