Edited by Songthip Ounpraseuth, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section would like to thank J. Jack Lee for his service over the past year. He will assume the past chair position, while Dianne Finkelstein will become chair and Jianwen Cai will become chair-elect.

The Biometrics Section will sponsor the following invited sessions at the 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings in San Diego, California, from July 28 to August 2:

• Recent Methodology Developed for the Design of Early-Phase Clinical Trials
  Organizer: Thomas Braun
• Statistical Challenges and Innovative Solutions for Correlated Data
  Organizer: Peiyong (Annie) Xu
• Statistical Methods for High-Dimensional Complex-Structured Object Data
  Organizer: Veera Baladandayuthapani
• Biomarkers for Risk Prediction, Disease Detection, and Treatment Effect Estimation: Statistical Issues
  Organizer: Layla Parast
• Shrinkage Estimation: Unifying Different Perspectives
  Organizer: Bhramar Mukherjee
• New Methodological Advances in Network-Based Analysis of Omics Data
  Organizer: Ali Shojaie

Abstract submission will be open until February 1 for JSM 2012 contributed and topic-contributed papers.

Topic-contributed sessions are a nice alternative to contributed sessions because they are organized around a central topic, have longer talks (20 minutes rather than 15), and one can have discussants. Sessions consist of five speakers (e.g., four speakers and one discussant; three speakers and two discussants).