The Mental Health Section recently completed its first student paper award competition, naming one first-place winner and three honorable mentions. In all, 16 papers were received from students worldwide.

First Place

Ying Liu of Columbia University for “Augmented Multistage Outcome-Weighted Learning for Estimating Personalized Dynamic Treatment Regimes”

Honorable Mention

Qiaolin Chen of the University of California at Los Angeles for “A Bayesian Family Factor Model for Multiple Outcomes”
Megan Schuler of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for “Addressing Confounding When Estimating the Effects of Latent Classes on a Distal Outcome”
Pan Wu of the University of Rochester for “Causal Inference for Community-Based Multi-Layered Intervention Study”

Current undergraduate and graduate students at any level, as well as those who graduated in 2013 but submitted research they conducted as students, were eligible. Each paper was judged in terms of the importance of the problem in mental health and the quality of the statistical methodology, application, and writing.

A prize of $250 was awarded to Liu. The winning entries will be displayed in poster format and the awards announced at the section’s mixer during JSM 2014 in Boston.