Dan Nettleton, Laurence H. Baker Endowed Chair in Biological Statistics and Professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University, co-organized this conference in May that was co-sponsored by the IMS. He writes:
The Conference on New Statistical Methods for Next Generation Sequencing Data was held on May 11, 2012, in Howe Hall’s Alliant Energy Lee Liu Auditorium on the campus of Iowa State University. Invited plenary presentations were given by Sunduz Keles, University of Wisconsin-Madison (Statistical and Computational Aspects of ChIP-seq Data Analysis: From Design to Biological Discovery); Alicia Oshlack, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Australia (Challenges in the Analysis Pipeline for RNA-seq Data); Terry Speed, University of California at Berkeley (Co-methylation); Nancy Zhang, University of Pennsylvania (Detection of DNA Mutations in Case Control and Multisample High-Throughput Sequencing Data); and Hongyu Zhao, Yale University (Design Issues in Using NGS in Genetics Association Studies).

These excellent talks were accompanied by a poster session that highlighted the work of 15 research groups. More than 230 people participated in the conference. The conference was co-organized by Karin Dorman, Peng Liu, and Dan Nettleton, and co-sponsored by IMS, the American Statistical Association, and the Department of Statistics, the Biotechnology Council, and the Laurence H. Baker Endowment at Iowa State University.