Amy Willis

Amy Willis is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington, Seattle. She holds adjunct roles in the Department of Statistics and is affiliated with multiple interdisciplinary institutes, including the Center for Microbiome Sciences and Therapeutics and the eScience Institute. Her research focuses on developing statistical methods for ecological and microbiome data analysis, emphasizing reproducibility and rigorous inference. Willis earned her PhD in Statistics from Cornell University (2017) and has held roles in academia and industry, including a Google internship (2015). She is a recipient of the NIH Outstanding Investigator Award (2019) and has mentored numerous graduate students.

Key research interests include microbiome statistics, phylogenetic methods, and high-dimensional data analysis. Her work bridges computational biology and statistical theory, with applications in environmental and medical sciences. Willis has led NIH-funded projects on reproducible microbiome discovery and zoonotic exposure impacts. She actively contributes to open-source tools like anvi’o and QIIME 2, emphasizing reproducible workflows.

Willis is a sought-after speaker, having delivered keynote addresses at global conferences such as the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the Microbiome Virtual International Forums. Her teaching spans biostatistical theory and computational skills, including courses on linear models and R programming. She is committed to diversity initiatives, serving as a faculty liaison for the UW’s Statisticians and Biostatisticians of Underrepresented Genders (SBUG) group.