Edited by Songthip Ounpraseuth, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section held its annual business committee meeting at JSM 2011 in Miami Beach, Florida. Complete minutes of the meeting will be made available on the section website.

Section chair, J. Jack Lee, called the meeting to order, welcomed members and guests, and introduced the members of the executive committee. The minutes of last year’s meeting were distributed and accepted.

Dianne Finkelstein provided information about additional appointments and nominations for 2012. Tim Johnson was appointed the 2012 JSM program chair, and Daniel Scharfstein was appointed the 2012 ENAR program chair. Also, Jianwen Cai was nominated and won the election for chair elect-elect. Finally, Scarlett Bellamy was nominated and won the election for the Council of Sections representative for 2012–2014.

Lee spoke for Jason Fine regarding ENAR 2011, which was held in Miami, Florida, from March 20–30. The program committee received roughly 60 proposals for invited sessions. Of these, 17 were sponsored by the ASA Biometrics Section, a large increase over previous years due in part to a 50% increase in the total number of invited sessions. Sessions were scored by each member of the program committee, with the average score used to rank sessions. Sessions sponsored by the ASA Biometrics Section were scored highly by the section program chair and ranked highly among all reviewers. Topics covered included functional and high-dimensional data analysis; the analysis of complex imaging data—including fMRI and neuroimaging—and applications in genetics, proteomics, and other complex biological systems. In addition, 10 poster sessions and 23 contributed paper sessions were sponsored by the section.

Tianxi Cai spoke about the 2011 JSM program. The biometrics section organized nine invited sessions, including six as primary sponsor and three as cosponsor. The topics included risk prediction and classification with high-dimensional data, survival analysis, statistical genomics, non- and semiparametric methods, and dimension reduction methods.

Additionally, there were nine topic-contributed sessions on topics ranging from design and analysis of clinical trials to analysis of complex studies with high-dimensional predictors or missing information on either the outcome due to censoring or the predictors due to risk set sampling.

Barry Graubard gave a brief account of David Byar, after whom the section’s young investigator award is named. Byar started with medical training, but recognized the importance of statistics early in his career. In addition to his individual contributions to biostatistical methods in cancer research, he had a gift for identifying talented individuals and inspiring them to greater heights, which he exhibited in multiple leadership roles at the National Cancer Institute.

This year, there were 26 papers submitted to the Byar Award committee, which consisted of Graubard (chair), Jack Lee, Finkelstein, Kathy Cronin, Joanna Shih, and Peter Kraft.

Daniela Witten of the University of Washington is this year’s winner of the David P. Byar Young Investigator Award. She received $1,500 for the paper “Penalized Classification Using Fisher’s Linear Discriminant,” which was presented at JSM.

This year’s travel award winners include the following:

• Genevera Allen, Rice University, for “A Generalized Least Squares Matrix Decomposition”
• Qunhua Li, University of California at Berkeley, for “Measuring Reproducibility of High-Throughput Experiments”
• Jessica Minnier, Harvard University, for “Risk Classification with an Adaptive Naïve Bayes Kernel Machine Model”
• Layla Parast, Harvard University, for “Landmark Prediction of Long-Term Survival Incorporating Short-Term Event Time Information”
• Sihai Dave Zhao, Harvard University, for “Grouped Variable Selection via Hierarchical Models”

Finally, Roslyn Stone, chair of strategic initiatives, announced that the winner of the “Developing the Next Generation of Biostatisticians” initiative from January was a proposal by Jane Monaco and Amy Herring.

Applications Invited for Byar Young Investigator Award, Travel Awards

Are you planning to submit an abstract for the 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM)? If so, you should know the ASA Biometrics Section is seeking applications for the 2012 David P. Byar Young Investigator Award. This award is given to a young investigator for best emerging work to be presented at JSM. The award commemorates the late David Byar, a biostatistician who made significant contributions to the development and application of statistical methods and was esteemed as an exceptional mentor during his career at the National Cancer Institute. The winner will receive $1,500.

In addition to the Byar Award, the Biometrics Section may provide travel awards to the authors of other outstanding papers that are submitted to the competition. Applicants must meet the following criteria:

• Have held a doctorate in statistics, biostatistics, or a related quantitative field for three years or less as of April 1 of the current year, or be currently enrolled as a student in a doctoral program in statistics or biostatistics and in active pursuit of a doctoral degree.
• Be a current member of the Biometrics Section (applicant may join at the time of submission for a $5 annual membership fee [$3 for students]). Please note that membership in the ASA does not automatically confer section membership; ASA members must join individual sections in addition to their generic membership.
• Be first author of the paper. The paper may be unsubmitted, submitted, or under review, but may not have already appeared in a journal either online or in print at the time of the application or have been accepted for publication as of January 1 of 2012.
• Be scheduled to present the same paper submitted for the award at the 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings in San Diego, California, as either a talk or poster.
• Not have submitted the paper to any other ASA section 2012 student/young investigator award competition.

Applicants must submit their JSM abstracts to the Biometrics Section, which will organize a series of topic-contributed sessions to highlight the Byar and travel award winners.

Applicants should complete their application by submitting the following materials:

• A cover letter certifying that the applicant meets the eligibility requirements and is not submitting the paper to any other ASA section student/young investigator award competition
• A current CV
• One copy of the finished paper

All materials must be submitted electronically on or before January 1, 2012. Applications and questions should be sent to J. Jack Lee at jjlee@mdanderson.org.

The 2012 awards committee is composed of the 2012 current and past section chairs and chair-elect as well as three additional individuals to be appointed by the section chairs prior to the competition.

For the 2012 competition, the finalists for the Byar Award will be announced one week prior to the JSM abstract deadline on February 1, 2012. Finalists should email the section JSM program chair, Timothy D. Johnson, at tdjtdj@umich.edu and submit a topic-contributed abstract for JSM.

Information regarding this award is also available on the section website.