The Health Policy Statistics Section (HPSS) presented its Mid-Career Award and Long-Term Excellence Award on October 9 during the keynote session of the 11th International Conference on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS), held at the Providence Biltmore Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island.

Long-Term Excellence Award

Constantine Gatsonis of Brown University and Donald Hedeker of The University of Chicago received the Long-Term Excellence Award in recognition of their outstanding leadership and sustained contribution to the development and application of statistical methods in health care policy and health services research, and for service to the section.

Gatsonis is the Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor of Biostatistics and chair of the department of biostatistics at Brown University and a leading authority on the evaluation of medical test technology for diagnosis and prediction. His research ranges from the design and conduct of multi-center clinical studies to research synthesis and health care policy implications. He has also contributed to the statistical foundations of health services and outcomes research by developing and applying hierarchical Bayesian methods for studies of variations in health care use and outcomes and for the comparison of health care providers.

Gatsonis has served on numerous review and advisory panels and currently chairs the Committee on Theoretical and Applied Statistics of the National Academies. He helped establish the Health Policy Statistics Section in 1994, co-chaired the inaugural International Conference on Health Policy Statistics in 1995, and served as founding editor in chief of the journal Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Association for Health Services Research.

Hedeker is a professor of biostatistics in the department of public health sciences of The University of Chicago. He is an expert in the development and use of advanced statistical methods for clustered and longitudinal data, with a particular emphasis on mixed-effects models. He is the primary author of several freeware computer programs for mixed-effects analysis.

Hedeker was co-chair of the 10th ICHPS in 2013 and has served in several other roles for the ASA, including as chair of the Mental Health Section in 2015. He has been a member of numerous grant review committees and editorial boards. Hedeker is a fellow of the ASA.

Mid-Career Award

Elizabeth Stuart of The Johns Hopkins University received the Mid-Career Award for her contributions to developing statistical methods and for continuing achievement at the frontier of statistical practice and research in health care policy and health services research.

Stuart is a professor in the department of mental health, department of biostatistics, and department of health policy and management of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her primary research interests are in statistical methodology for causal inference and missing data, especially in the trade-offs in different study designs for estimating causal effects. Her primary substantive research areas are education, health policy, and mental health.

Stuart has had an organizing role in several conferences, including the ICHPS, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. She is a fellow of the ASA and a member of several national advisory panels, including being the chair of the Inaugural Clinical Trials Advisory Panel in the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). 

MORE ONLINE: Highlights of the 11th International Conference on Health Policy Statistics