Edited by Songthip Ounpraseuth, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section recently chose Yang Ning of The Johns Hopkins University as the David P. Byar Young Investigator Award winner for “Reducing the Sensitivity to Nuisance Parameters in Nonstandard Likelihood.”

The David P. Byar Young Investigator Award is given annually to a new researcher in the Biometrics Section who presents an original manuscript at the Joint Statistical Meetings. The award commemorates David Byar, a renowned biostatistician who made significant contributions to the development and application of statistical methods during his career at the National Cancer Institute. This year, the committee received a record-setting 62 submissions of high-quality papers and chose the following additional travel award winners:

• Huaihou Chen of Columbia University for “A Marginal Approach to Reduced-Rank Penalized Spline Smoothing with Application to Multilevel Functional Data”
• Shuo Chen of Emory University for “A Bayesian Hierarchical Framework for Modeling Brain Connectivity of Neuroimaging Data”
• Jeff Goldsmith of The Johns Hopkins University for “Corrected Confidence Bands for Functional Data Using Principal Components”
• Min Jin Ha of The University of North Carolina for “Testing and Estimation of Partial Correlation Networks”
• Peisong Han of the University of Michigan for “Conditional Empirical Likelihood Inference for Unbalanced Longitudinal Data”
• Yen-Tsung Huang of Harvard University for “Joint Analysis of SNP and Gene Expression Data in Genome-Wide Association Studies”
• Han Liu of The Johns Hopkins University for “The Nonparanormal Skeptic”
• Jennifer Sinnott of Harvard University for “Omnibus Risk Assessment via Accelerated Failure Time Kernel Machine Modeling”

The Byar award comes with a $1,500 prize, while the travel awards include $800 to go toward the winners’ travel to JSM so they can present their papers.