Edited by Feifei Wei, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section is pleased to sponsor the following six Continuing Education (CE) courses and six invited sessions at the 2013 Joint Statistical Meetings in Montréal, Québec, Canada. The titles, instructors, and organizers are given below. Additional information about the CE courses will be provided in the May issue of the Biometrics Section News.

CE Courses

• Statistical Methods in Genetic Association Studies, taught by Danyu Lin of The University of North Carolina
• Personalized Medicine and Dynamic Treatment Regimes, taught by Michael Kosorok of The University of North Carolina and Eric Labler of North Carolina State University
• Analysis of Interval-Censored Survival Data, taught by Philip Hougaard of Lundbeck
• Statistical Methods for Medical Imaging Analysis, taught by Hongtu Zhu and Haipeng Shen of The University of North Carolina
• Statistical Evaluation of Prognostic Biomarkers, taught by Patrick J. Heagerty and Paramita Saha-Chaudhuri of the University of Washington and Duke University
• Practical Software Engineering for Statisticians (co-sponsored with Section on Statistical Computing), taught by Murray Stokely of Google

Invited Sessions

• Current Statistical Issues in Comparative Effectiveness Research, organized by Haibo Zhou of The University of North Carolina
• Emerging Statistical Methods for Big Data, organized by Ping Ma of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Frontiers in Longitudinal and Survival Data Analysis, organized by Gang Li of the University of California at Los Angeles
• Big Data, Big Impact When Statistics Matter, organized by Ching-Ti Liu of Boston University
• Questions in Cancer Research: What Are the Most Pressing Statistical Problems?, organized by Michelle Dunn of the National Cancer Institute

Awards Competitions

The section also sponsored the 2013 David P. Byar Young Investigator Award and travel awards competitions. Through a comprehensive review process, the committee chose five travel award winners in addition to the Byar Award winner, Kyu Ha Lee of the Harvard School of Public Health, for “Bayesian Semiparametric Analysis of Semi-Competing Risks Data: Estimating Readmission Rates Among Pancreatic Cancer Patients.”

Travel awards went to the following:

Noorie Hyun of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for “Threshold-Dependent Proportional Hazards Model for Current Status Data with Biomarker Subject to Measurement Error”

Denis Agniel of the Harvard School of Public Health for “Identifying Multiple Regulation in Semiparametric Regression Models”

Xinyi Lin of the Harvard School of Public Health for “Tests for Interactions Between a Genetic Marker Set and Environment on Generalized Linear Models”

Jesse Yenchih Hsu of the University of Pennsylvania for “Calibrating Sensitivity Analysis to Observed Covariates in Observational Studies”

Arend Voorman of the University of Washington for “Graph Estimation with Joint Additive Models”

Lee will receive a $1,500 award, while the travel award winners will each receive $800 toward costs to present their papers at JSM 2013.

The Byar Award Committee consisted of Dianne Finkelstein (Committee Chair, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University), Jianwen Cai (University of North Carolina), Mike Daniels (University of Texas at Austin), Timothy Johnson (University of Michigan), Guosheng Yin (University of Hong Kong), and David Schoenfeld (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University).

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