The Section on Bayesian Statistical Science (SBSS) was active at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Chicago, Illinois, sponsoring eight invited, 10 topic-contributed, and 14 contributed sessions.

Two of the topic-contributed sessions featured the winners of the SBSS student paper competition: Francois-Xavier Briol (University of Warwick), Trevor Campbell (MIT), Xi Chen (Duke), Chenyang Gu (Brown), David Jones (Harvard), Daniel Kowal (Cornell), Dootika Vats (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities), and Theodore Westling (University of Washington).

Additionally, two students were given special awards. Akihiko Nishimura (Duke) was awarded with the Laplace prize for most outstanding student research paper and Behnaz Pirzamanbein (Lund University) was awarded for outstanding Bayesian research applied to climate science.

Beyond sponsoring sessions, SBSS also sponsored roundtable discussions on Bayesian nonparametric modeling by Athanasios Kottas and Bayesian model selection by Philip Dawid. Members were also given the opportunity to meet and mingle at the SBSS mixer Tuesday night, where they honored the student paper award winners.

SBSS is already making plans for the JSM 2017 program. While proposals for invited sessions are closed, proposals for topic-contributed sessions will be accepted soon.

For more information about SBSS activities, visit the section website.