Submissions are now being accepted for the 2014 Biopharmaceutical Section student paper awards. These awards ($1,000 for first place, $600 for second place, and $400 for third) will be presented during the Biopharmaceutical Section open business meeting held at the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings. Winners will present their paper during one of the contributed paper sessions at JSM and are encouraged to attend the meeting to receive their award in person.

Student research papers with statistical content applicable to the biopharmaceutical arena are eligible for consideration. Submissions are judged for clarity, contribution to statistics, and biopharmaceutical applicability. Suitable topics include methodological issues in preclinical or clinical trials, epidemiology studies of drug (or device or biological) safety, genetic studies predicting drug (or biological) response, laboratory and toxicological data analyses, methods for high-dimensional data from high-throughput screening, and nonlinear pharmacokinetic modeling.

Both a complete paper and a “blinded” paper should be submitted electronically in .pdf format by December 16. The submission email should contain the name, school, and contact information of the student.

In the blinded version, the student’s name and affiliation/school should not appear and names for references should not be included in the text (numbers for references should be used in text; names should appear on reference page only). References that would unblind a reviewer to the student’s name or the student’s advisor/collaborator should be removed and replaced with “reference removed.”

The length of the student paper should not exceed 15 pages of double-spaced text with no more than five additional pages of appendices (20 pages maximum). Because of the volume of submissions received, the length limitation will be strictly enforced. Consider a manuscript style for the paper to facilitate publication in the proceedings for JSM or another appropriate journal.

Papers must be submitted no later than one year after graduation and reflect research completed while a student. Submissions should be labeled “Biopharmaceutical Section Student Paper Submission” and sent to Ivan Chan, Biopharmaceutical Section JSM 2014 program chair, at ivan_chan@merck.com.

In addition to submitting a paper for judging, winners also must submit an abstract of the work as a contributed paper for JSM. All participants will be notified prior to the abstract submission deadline as to whether they have won or not. Requirements for contributed paper submission must be followed in addition to those for the student paper submission.