The Southern California Chapter recently had the opportunity to participate in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), which was held May 8–13 in Los Angeles. While this global science competition for high-school students does not have a separate award category for statistics, the ASA was one of many participating organizations that sponsored both judging and awards.
A large team of judges was required to review more than 1,200 entries from 65 countries, all of which were winners of various local and regional science fairs. On the first day of reviews, the judges selected about 70 projects that displayed detailed results of statistical analysis, and from this group, chose 14 entries for the final interview round the next day. After conducting interviews with the finalists in the morning, the judges selected the three winners and six honorable mentions.
The first-place award went to Andrew Liu of Henry Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, who developed a method for identifying interactions in a network of immune system pathways that lead to transplant rejection using a statistical method called pathway analysis. He used the statistical software package R to implement the algorithms and then validated his algorithm using existing kidney and lung transplant data sets. He subsequently identified a novel drug that is thought to inhibit these specific transplant rejection pathways and designed an animal study to evaluate the effectiveness of this drug in preventing transplant rejection. Liu received $1,500, while the second- and third-place winners received $500 and $250, respectively.
Chapter president Robert Gould of the University of California at Los Angeles attended the special awards night to present ASA certificates to the winners. All winners and honorable mention awardees received one-year subscriptions to Significance and CHANCE.
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