Donald Hedeker, Nicholas Horton, Susan Marcus, and Emily Scherer

The section recently completed its second annual student paper award competition, organized by Susan Marcus. The first-place winner is Elisa Sheng of the University of Washington for her paper, “Estimating Causal Effects of Treatment in RCTs with Provider and Subject Noncompliance.” Honorable mentions were given to the following:

• Trang Quynh Nguyen of Johns Hopkins Department of Mental Health for “Causal Mediation Analysis with a Binary Outcome and Multiple Continuous or Ordinal Mediators: Simulations and Application to an Alcohol Intervention”
• Wenjing Zheng of the University of California, San Francisco/Berkeley for “Marginal Structural Models with Counterfactual Effect Modifiers: A Twist to a Familiar Story”
• Nicholas Henderson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison for “AR(1) Latent Class Models for Longitudinal Count Data”

JSM 2015

Section program chair, Nicholas Horton, and program chair-elect, Zhehui Luo, put together a slate of talks and roundtables. Invited sessions sponsored and co-sponsored by the section include the following:

• Recent Advances in Diagnostic Classification Models
• Statistics in Imaging: Open Problems
• Making Better Decisions: Recent Statistical Advances and Challenges in Aging and Dementia Research
• Functional Data Analysis in Medical Imaging
• Differential and/or Biased Missingness: Myths, Methods, and Manifestations
• Recent Advances in Mental Health Clinical Trial Design: Statistical Challenges and Opportunities

Sponsored and co-sponsored roundtables include the following:

• Closing the Research Practice Gap in Personalized Medicine, led by Eric Laber of North Carolina State University
• Applying Item Response Theory to Develop and Improve Patient-Reported Outcome Measures, led by Lan Yu of the University of Pittsburgh
• Statistical and Study Design Issues in Clinical and Translational Research, led by Mohammad Rahbar of UT Health
• How to Get Involved with ASA Activities and Network, led by Douglas Gunzler of Case Western Reserve University

Be sure to join us at our business meeting August 11 from 5:00 p.m.–6:30 p.m. You will hear the state of the section reports from the executive committee and mingle with fellow mental health statisticians. Light refreshments will be served, and all section members and friends are welcome.

About Us

Having recently celebrated our two-year anniversary, the Mental Health Statistics Section aims to provide a forum for communication among statisticians and mental health researchers, facilitate development and use of sound statistical methodologies in mental health research, and promote career opportunities for statisticians in mental health research.

We are organizing a webinar on longitudinal data analysis of categorical outcomes, to be conducted by Section Chair Don Hedeker. Be sure to visit the website for details about this and other activities.