Edited by Sheng Luo, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

Want to get more involved in JSM? Consider volunteering to chair a session. Chairing a session is an important responsibility and a great way to meet your colleagues. If you are interested, contact our section’s 2016 program chair, Jeffrey Morris, at jefmorris@mdanderson.org.

JSM 2016 Program

The Biometrics Section will sponsor the following five continuing education courses and six invited sessions at the 2016 Joint Statistical Meetings in Chicago:

CE Courses

• Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis (full-day), taught by Garrett Fitzmaurice of Harvard University
• Patient-Reported Outcomes: Measurement, Implementation, and Interpretation (half-day), taught by Joseph Cappelleri of Pfizer Inc.
• Regression Modeling Strategies (full-day), taught by Frank Harrell of Vanderbilt University
• An Introduction to the Joint Modeling of Longitudinal and Survival Data with Applications in R (full-day), taught by Dmitris Rizopoulos of Erasmus University Medical Center
• Designs for Phase I Oncology Trials (half-day), taught by Nolan Wages of the University of Virginia

Invited Sessions

• Statistical Methods for Analyzing Microbiome Data, organized by Sanjay Shete of MD Anderson Cancer Center
• Statisticians and Multiple Sclerosis Research, organized by Elizabeth Sweeney of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Statistical and Computational Advances in Microbiome and Metagenomic Studies, organized by Hongzhe Li of the University of Pennsylvania
• Statistical Methods for Aging and Dementia, organized by Yorghos Tripodis of Boston University
• Statistics in Personalized Medicine, organized by Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
• Joint Modeling of Survival Time with Another Outcome in Clinical Trials or Observational Studies, organized by Tianle Hu of Eli Lily and Company

Andrea Troxel, the section’s JSM continuing education chair, and Dipankar Bandyopadhay, the section’s JSM program chair, organized these courses and sessions.

Byar, Travel Award Winners

Clara Happ of the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich was honored with the David P. Byar Young Investigator Award for her paper, “Multivariate Functional Principal Component Analysis for Data Observed on Different (Dimensional) Domains.”

The 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.

Through a comprehensive review process of 40 submissions, the committee chose the following 10 travel award winners in addition to Happ:

• Dandan Xu, University of Florida, for “Sequential BART for Imputation of Missing Covariates”
• Shanshan Li, Indiana University Fairbanks School of Public Health, for “Recurrent Event Data Analysis with Intermittently Observed Time-Varying Covariates”
• Lu Mao, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for “Semiparametric Regression Analysis of Interval-Censored Competing Risks Data”
• Brian Segal, University of Michigan, for “Fast Approximation of Small P-values in Permutation Tests by Partitioning the Permutation Space”
• Sen Zhao, University of Washington, for “High-Dimensional Hypothesis Testing with the Lasso”
• Caleb Miles, University of California at Berkeley, for “A Class of Semiparametric Tests of Treatment Effect Robust to Measurement Error of a Confounder”
• Teng Zhang, North Carolina State University, for “Adaptive False Negative Control Under Block-Structured Dependence with Genomic Applications”
• Keegan Korthauer, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, for “scDD: A Statistical Approach for Identifying Differential Distributions in Single-Cell RNA-seq Experiments”
• Yuxiang Xie, University of Washington, for “Sure Screening for Transelliptical Graphical Models”
• Xiangyu Luo, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, for “Nonparametric Bayesian Learning of Heterogeneous Dynamic Transcription Factor Networks”

Happ will receive $2,000, and travel award winners will each receive $1,000 to offset the cost of presenting their papers in two Biometrics Session–sponsored topic-contributed sessions at JSM 2016.

The Byar Award Committee consisted of Mike Daniels (Chair, University of Texas at Austin), Diana Miglioretti (University of California-Davis), Timothy Johnson (University of Michigan), Debashis Ghosh (University of Colorado-Denver), Steven Ma (Yale University), and Kyoungmi Kim (University of California-Davis).