Biometrics Section Announces JSM 2012 CE Courses, Invited Sessions

Songthip Ounpraseuth, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section will sponsor four Continuing Education (CE) courses and six invited sessions at the 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings in San Diego, California. Following is a list of the CE courses and instructors and the invited sessions.

CE Courses

Smoothing Splines: Methods and Applications
Instructor: Yuedong Wang

Statistical Methods for Genome-Wide Association, Copy Number Variants and Rare Variants Analysis
Instructors: Hongzhe Lee and Wei Pan

Statistics Analysis with Missing Data
Instructors: Rod Little and Trivellore Raghunath

Design and Analysis of Biomarker Studies for Risk Prediction
Instructors: Tianxi Cai and Yingye Zheng

Invited Sessions

Recent Methodology Developed for the Design of Early-Phase Clinical Trials
Organizer: Thomas Braun

Statistical Challenges and Innovative Solutions for Correlated Data
Organizer: Peiyong (Annie) Qu

Statistical Methods for High-Dimensional Complex-Structured Object Data
Organizer: Veera Baladandayuthapani

Award Competitions

The section also announces the results of the 2012 David Byar Award competition. A record high of 62 submissions was received. Through an anonymous review process, the award committee chose Yang Ning of The Johns Hopkins University for “Reducing the Sensitivity to Nuisance Parameters in Nonstandard Likelihood,” with co-author Kung-Yee Liang. Additionally, travel awards were given to the following:

• Huaihou Chen of Columbia University for “A Marginal Approach to Reduced-Rank Penalized Spline Smoothing with Application to Multilevel Functional Data,” with co-authors Yuanjia Wang, Myunghee Cho Paik, and H. Alex Choi
• Shuo Chen of Emory University for “A Bayesian Hierarchical Framework for Modeling Brain Connectivity of Neuroimaging Data,” with co-author F. DuBois Bowman
• Jeff Goldsmith of The Johns Hopkins University for “Corrected Confidence Bands for Functional Data Using Principal Components,” with co-authors Sonja Greven and Ciprian Crainiceanu
• Min Jin Ha of The University of North Carolina for “Testing and Estimation of Partial Correlation Networks,” with co-author Fred A. Wright
• Peisong Han of the University of Michigan for “Conditional Empirical Likelihood Inference for Unbalanced Longitudinal Data,” with co-authors Peter X.-K. Song and Lu Wang
• Yen-Tsung Huang of Harvard University for “Joint Analysis of SNP and Gene Expression Data in Genome-Wide Association Studies,” with co-authors Xihong Lin and Tyler VanderWeele
• Han Liu of The Johns Hopkins University for “The Nonparanormal Skeptic,” with co-authors Fang Han, Ming Yuan, John Lafferty, and Larry Wasserman
• Jennifer Sinnott of Harvard University for “Omnibus Risk Assessment via Accelerated Failure Time Kernel Machine Modeling,” with co-author Tianxi Cai

The Byar award winner will receive $1,500, and travel award winners will each receive $800.

The Byar Award Committee consisted of J. Jack Lee (chair), Dianne Finkelstein, Jianwen Cai, David Schoenfeld, Joanna Shih, and Guosheng Yin.