Edited by Songthip Ounpraseuth, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section held its annual business committee meeting at JSM 2012 in San Diego, California, during which they shared election appointments, summarized past conferences, and announced the winners of several section awards.

Jianwen Cai, 2013 section chair, provided information about additional appointments and nominations for 2013. The section appointed Wei Sun as the 2013 JSM Program chair, Doug Schaubel as the 2013 ENAR Program chair, and Donglin Zeng as the 2013 Continuing Education chair Also, Mike Daniels is the new chair-elect-elect, Yu Shen is the section’s 2013–2014 secretary/treasurer, and Limin Clegg is the Council of Sections representative for 2013–2015.

Section Chair Dianne Finkelstein spoke for Daniel Scharfstein regarding ENAR 2012. The annual ENAR meeting was held in Washington, DC, from April 1–4. The program committee received roughly 89 proposals for invited sessions. Of these, 54 were accepted, a substantial number of which were sponsored by the Biometrics Section. Topics covered 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.

Mousumi Banerjee and Denise Roe spoke for the Council of Sections about an initiative to promote visibility of statistics as a discipline among U.S. college students. Awards of up to $10,000 are available for projects, with priority given to those with the International Year of Statistics or 175th anniversary of the ASA as themes. The deadline for proposals is early spring.

Barry Graubard gave a brief account of David Byar, after whom the section’s young investigator award is named, before announcing this year’s winner: Yang Ning of The Johns Hopkins University for her paper, “Reducing the Sensitivity to Nuisance Parameters in Nonstandard Likelihood,” with co-author Kung-Yee Liang.

The Byar Award Committee consisted of J. Jack Lee (committee chair, MD Anderson Cancer Center), Dianne Finkelstein (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University), Jianwen Cai (The University of North Carolina), David Schoenfeld (Harvard University), Joanna Shih (National Cancer Institute), and Guosheng Yin (University of Hong Kong). The committee received a record high of 62 submissions and, through an anonymous review process, chose the following eight travel award winners in addition to the Byar award winner:

• Huaihou Chen, Columbia University, for “A Marginal Approach to Reduced-Rank Penalized Spline Smoothing with Application to Multilevel Functional Data” with co-authors Yuanjia Wang, Myunghee Cho Paik, and H. Alex Choi
• Shuo Chen, Emory University, for “A Bayesian Hierarchical Framework for Modeling Brain Connectivity of Neuroimaging Data” with co-author F. DuBois Bowman
• Jeff Goldsmith, The Johns Hopkins University, for “Corrected Confidence Bands for Functional Data Using Principal Components” with co-authors Sonja Greven and Ciprian Crainiceanu
• Min Jin Ha, The University of North Carolina, for “Testing and Estimation of Partial Correlation Networks” with co-author Fred A. Wright
• Peisong Han, University of Michigan, for “Conditional Empirical Likelihood Inference for Unbalanced Longitudinal Data” with co-authors Peter X.-K. Song and Lu Wang
• Yen-Tsung Huang, Harvard University, for “Joint Analysis of SNP and Gene Expression Data in Genome-Wide Association Studies” with co-authors Xihong Lin and Tyler VanderWeele
• Han Liu, The Johns Hopkins University, for “The Nonparanormal Skeptic” with co-authors Fang Han, Ming Yuan, John Lafferty, and Larry Wasserman
• Jennifer Sinnott, Harvard University, for “Omnibus Risk Assessment via Accelerated Failure Time Kernel Machine Modeling” with co-author Tianxi Cai

Applications are invited for the 2013 Byar Young Investigator Award and Biometrics Section travel awards; the deadline is December 1.

Finally, Section Chair Dianne Finkelstein raised the prospect of more active participation in the WNAR annual meeting. In the past, the section has not participated formally, but there was considerable interest in expanding the section’s role by , for example, sponsoring invited sessions and supporting student travel awards.

Complete minutes of the meeting will be made available on the section website.