The Health Policy Statistics Section (HPSS) presented the 2018 HPSS Achievement Awards—including the Mid-Career Award and Long-Term Excellence Awards—January 12, following the plenary session of the 12th International Conference on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS) at the Charleston Marriott Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina.

The awards “honor individuals who have made significant contributions to the development of statistical methods or have developed innovative statistical applications for health care policy or health services research.” The awards are given to encourage research in this area and increase awareness of HPSS in the statistical community.

Sally C. Morton of Virginia Tech and Paul R. Rosenbaum of the University of Pennsylvania each received the 2018 HPSS Long-Term Excellence Award, which recognizes significant contributions to health care policy and health services research through mentoring and/or service that advance the aims of HPSS.

Anirban Basu of the University of Washington received the 2018 HPSS Mid-Career Award, which recognizes leaders in health care policy and health services research who have made outstanding contributions through methodological or applied work. Furthermore, the award honors those who show a promise of continued excellence at the frontier of statistical practice that advances the aims of HPSS.

Morton is dean of the college of science, professor in the department of statistics, and Lay Nam Chang Dean’s Chair at Virginia Tech. She was the 2009 president of the American Statistical Association and is a Fellow of the ASA and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a recipient of the Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences, as well as the ASA Founders Award.

Morton is an internationally known statistician, with more than 200 papers, book chapters, and peer-reviewed reports in statistical methods and applications—most recently related to patient-centered comparative effectiveness research (CER), observational studies, treatment efficacy and trial quality, and evidence synthesis. She has collaborated on a wide range of clinical and societal topics such as back pain, health care quality, homelessness, mental health, and substance abuse.

For her expertise in CER, Morton was appointed to the Methodology Committee of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. She also serves as a meta-analytic expert for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Evidence-Based Practice Center program, which provides systematic reviews on which many clinical practice guidelines and national health policy decisions are based. In addition, she has been a member of several National Academy of Medicine committees.

Morton has held multiple leadership roles in academia and industry. Prior to her current appointment at Virginia Tech, she was chair of biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh, vice president for statistics and epidemiology at RTI International, and head of the Statistics Group at the RAND Corporation. Morton’s effective leadership and mentorship have supported the members of these groups in making a significant impact on health services research and health policy in the nation.

Rosenbaum is the Robert G. Putzel Professor in the department of statistics at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He is the author of three books: Observational Studies; Design of Observational Studies; and Observation and Experiment: An Introduction to Causal Inference.

Rosenbaum is a Fellow of the ASA, received the George W. Snedecor Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies in 2003, and received the Nathan Mantel Award from the ASA Section on Statistics in Epidemiology in 2017. His research interests include the design and analysis of observational studies, health outcomes research, experimental design, and psychometrics. He has made extensive contributions to statistical methods for observational studies, including co-developing the propensity score, a now common tool in observational studies. Additionally, he has contributed to several other aspects of observational studies, including multivariate matching techniques, sensitivity analysis for unobserved confounding, evidence factors, the consequences of adjusting for a post-treatment variable, methods for generic unobserved biases, and instrumental variables.

Basu is the Stergachis Family Endowed Director of the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute, as well as a professor of health economics in the departments of pharmacy, health services, and economics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a health economist and statistician who specializes in research on comparative and cost-effectiveness analyses, causal inference methods, program evaluation, and outcomes research. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In addition, he was one of the panelists on the Second Panel on the Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health and Medicine.

Basu’s methodological contributions span works on developing new estimators for modeling health care expenditures, novel instrumental variable methods that deal with unobserved heterogeneity, and value of information methods. He chaired the 2010 ICHPS, was HPSS program chair for the Joint Statistical Meetings in 2008, and was a member of the planning or the advisory committee for four other ICHPS meetings. Basu’s leadership has helped strengthen the core constituency and dissemination of health policy, health services research, and outcomes research within the Health Policy Statistics Section.