Byar, Travel Award Winners Announced

Edited by Feifei Wei, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section recently chose Kyu Ha Lee of the Harvard School of Public Health as winner of the David P. Byar Young Investigator Award for “Bayesian Semiparametric Analysis of Semicompeting Risks Data: Estimating Readmission Rates Among Pancreatic Cancer Patients.”

The David P. Byar Young Investigator Award is given annually to a new researcher in the Biometrics Section who presents an original manuscript at the Joint Statistical Meetings. The award commemorates David Byar, a renowned biostatistician who made significant contributions to the development and application of statistical methods during his career at the National Cancer Institute.

The Byar Award Committee consisted of Dianne Finkelstein (committee chair, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University), Jianwen Cai (The University of North Carolina), Mike Daniels (The University of Texas at Austin), Timothy Johnson (University of Michigan), Guosheng Yin (University of Hong Kong), and David Schoenfeld (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University). Through a comprehensive review process, the committee chose the following five travel award winners in addition to the Byar Award winner:

• Noorie Hyun of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for “Threshold-Dependent Proportional Hazards Model for Current Status Data with Biomarker Subject to Measurement Error”
• Denis Agniel of the Harvard School of Public Health for “Identifying Multiple Regulation in Semiparametric Regression Models”
• Xinyi Lin of the Harvard School of Public Health for “Tests for Interactions Between a Genetic Marker Set and Environment on Generalized Linear Models”
• Jesse Yenchih Hsu of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for “Calibrating Sensitivity Analysis to Observed Covariates in Observational Studies”
• Arend Voorman of the University of Washington for “Graph Estimation with Joint Additive Models”

Lee will receive $1,500 and the Travel Award winners will each receive $800.

The committee was pleased with the response and exceptional quality of the applications. Also, the ASA Biometrics Section congratulates the award winners and committee members for their superb work.

JSM 2013

The Biometrics Section will sponsor six Continuing Education (CE) courses and six invited sessions at the 2013 Joint Statistical Meetings in Montréal, Canada. The titles, instructors, and organizers are given below.

CE Courses

• Statistical Methods in Genetic Association Studies, taught by Danyu Lin of The University of North Carolina
• Personalized Medicine and Dynamic Treatment Regimes, taught by Michael Kosorok of The University of North Carolina and Eric Labler of North Carolina State University
• Analysis of Interval-Censored Survival Data, taught by Philip Hougaard of Lundbeck
• Statistical Methods for Medical Imaging Analysis, taught by Hongtu Zhu and Haipeng Shen of The University of North Carolina
• Statistical Evaluation of Prognostic Biomarkers, taught by Patrick J. Heagerty of the University of Washington and Paramita Saha-Chaudhuri of Duke University
• Practical Software Engineering for Statisticians, taught by Murray Stokely of Google

Invited Sessions

• Current Statistical Issues in Comparative Effectiveness Research, organized by Haibo Zhou of The University of North Carolina
• Dynamic Treatment Regimes and Adaptive Designs Toward Personalized Health Care, organized by Lu Wang of the University of Michigan
• Emerging Statistical Methods for Big Data, organized by Ping Ma of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
• Frontiers in Longitudinal and Survival Data Analysis, organized by Gang Li of the University of California at Los Angeles
• Big Data, Big Impact When Statistics Matter, organized by Ching-Ti Liu of Boston University
• Questions in Cancer Research: What Are the Most Pressing Statistical Problems?, organized by Michelle Dunn of the National Cancer Institute

For information about locations and times, visit the online program.

Mixer and Business Meeting

Please join us at the Biometrics Section Mixer and Business Meeting during JSM 2013 on August 5, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Not only is it an excellent networking opportunity, but the 2013 David P. Byar Young Investigator Award and section travel awards will be presented at the mixer, which is open to all JSM attendees. We hope to see you there!

JSM 2014

It is also time to start thinking about invited sessions for next year’s Joint Statistical Meetings, which will be held August 2–7 in Boston, Massachusetts. Anyone interested in organizing an invited session or who has ideas for one should contact the section’s 2014 program chair, Jonathan Schildcrout, at jonathan.schildcrout@vanderbilt.edu.

A typical invited session consists of three 30-minute talks, followed by a 10-minute invited discussion and 10 minutes of floor discussion. However, other formats are possible. The 2013 program is a good source for examples.

Remember, the most mature ideas will have an advantage in competing for the limited number of slots, so it’s best to have your ideas in final form by the middle of June. The Biometrics Section will have at least four invited sessions, but will be able to compete for additional slots.

Finally, also submit ideas for short courses to the section’s 2013–2014 Continuing Education chair, Donglin Zeng, at dzeng@email.unc.edu.