Do you know someone in the Biopharmaceutical Section who you think deserves to become an ASA Fellow? If so, visit the Fellows web page to determine whether that person is already an ASA Fellow. If he/she is not, review the list of criteria for rating nominees and then send your nomination to the Biopharmaceutical Section Fellows Committee through Neal Thomas at snthomas99@yahoo.com. The committee does not typically sponsor candidates, but can help identify a sponsor and supply a letter of support from the section.

Members of the ASA Fellows Committee recognize there are numerous ways to make important contributions to the profession and do not restrict themselves to the review of research publications. Successful candidates will have distinguished themselves by organizing educational activities at the secondary and collegiate levels, organizing professional meetings and sections within meetings, effectively managing large groups of statisticians and supporting their external involvement in the profession, fundraising to support a statistical organization, strengthening local ASA chapters through innovative leadership and participation, and influencing regulatory or corporate statistical policy through research and communication.

JSM 2011 Biopharmaceutical Section Award Winners

Awards are presented annually at the Biopharmaceutical Section open business meeting during JSM. Student research papers with statistical content applicable to the biopharmaceutical arena are eligible for consideration. In addition to submitting a paper for judging, students also must submit an abstract of the work as a contributed paper for JSM. The categories for scoring are clarity, contribution to statistics, and biopharmaceutical applicability. It is not too early to plan now for next year’s competition. The deadline for submission is March 31, 2012.

Student Paper Award

David Vock, North Carolina State University, for “Mixed Model Analysis of Censored Longitudinal Data with Flexible Random Effects Density”

Poster Awards

First: Martin O. Carlsson, “A Comparison of Methods for Adjusting for the Baseline Measure”

Second: Kelly H. Zou, “Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Joint Modeling of Repeated Measures of Quasi-Continuous Patient-Reported Outcome and Binary Response Data”

Third: Yufan Zhao, “Reinforcement Learning Strategies for Lung Cancer Clinical Trials”

If you plan to present a poster at JSM 2012, consider participating in the section’s poster competition, which is open to all JSM attendees. Authors who compete for a poster awards cannot also compete for a student paper award. Three awards with prizes of $1,000, $600, and $400 will be given for first, second, and third place, respectively. The process is as follows:

• Submit an abstract through the Biopharmaceutical Section by the JSM 2012 abstract submission deadline.
• Submit your poster to Yongming Qu, chair of the section poster awards, at quyo@lilly.com by May 1, 2012.
• Each poster will be reviewed by two reviewers and an average score will be assigned. Posters with the highest scores will be the winners.
• Ribbons will be put on the corner of the posters to indicate the winners during the poster presentation at JSM.
• Winners will be announced with certificates at the Biopharmaceutical Section mixer at JSM 2012.