Paper Award Guidelines Announced

Member Survey
The Biopharmaceutical Section is launching a member survey this month to collect information about demographics, career development, compensation, professional experiences, and continuing education, as well as feedback on the section’s services. With the gathered information, the section will be in a better position to serve its members. You will receive an email from Edmund Luo on behalf of the survey committee requesting your participation. Please monitor your email for this message and follow the directions to the survey web site.

Student paper awards ($1,000 prize) are presented annually during the Joint Statistical Meetings Biopharmaceutical Section open business meeting. Winners are encouraged to attend the business meeting to receive the award in person. Student research papers with statistical content applicable to the biopharmaceutical arena are eligible for consideration.

In addition to submitting a paper for judging, the student must submit an abstract of the work as a contributed paper for JSM. The categories for scoring are clarity, contribution to statistics, and biopharmaceutical applicability. Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, methodological issues in preclinical or clinical trials, epidemiology studies of drug (or device or biological) safety, genetic studies predicting drug (or biological) response, laboratory and toxicological data analyses, methods for high-dimensional data from high-throughput screening, and nonlinear pharmacokinetic modeling.

The following guidelines will help make the judging process fair:

• Submissions should be labeled as a “student paper submission” and sent to Dionne Price, program chair for the Biopharmaceutical Section, at dionne.price@fda.hhs.gov.
• The work also must be submitted as a contributed paper for presentation at JSM. Requirements for contributed paper submission (December 1, 2009–February 1, 2010) must be followed in addition to those for the student paper submission.
• Submissions of student papers for consideration must be received electronically in Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format.
• Two versions of the paper should be submitted, a complete paper and a blinded paper. The submission email should contain the name, school, and contact information of the student.
• In the blinded paper, the student’s name and affiliation/school should not appear. Names for references should not be included in the text (numbers for references should be used in the text; names should appear on the reference page only). References that would unblind a reviewer to the student’s name or advisor/collaborator should be removed and replaced with the text “reference removed.”
• The length of the student paper should not exceed 15 pages of double-spaced type with no more than five additional pages of appendices (20 pages maximum).
• Papers must be submitted no later than one year after graduation and reflect research completed while the author was a student.

Consider a manuscript style for the paper that will facilitate publication in the JSM Proceedings or appropriate journal. The deadline for student paper submissions is March 31, 2010.