Stephanie Strakbein, Samantha Montag, Munir Winkel, and Lingyun Lyu will receive registration and travel support to attend CSP 2018.
John J. Bartko Award
Stephanie Strakbein completed a dual degree Bachelor of Science in Veterinary Science and Bachelor of Arts in Spanish at the University of Arizona and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Biostatistics at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU-PSU School of Public Health). She also works as a teaching assistant for graduate biostatistics courses and as a graduate research assistant to Thuan Nguyen. At present, she is assisting Nguyen’s research in the USRDS database by extracting data relevant to questions of interest identified by their collaborator, Al-Uzri, the clinical director of pediatric nephrology at OHSU. Together, their goal is to submit an abstract to the Pediatric Academic Society. In the long run, Strakbein and Nguyen will use this database for testing Nguyen’s developing method, called classified mixed model prediction, with the hope of publishing this work in an applied statistical/biostatistical journal. Strakbein also serves as president of the Portland ASA Student Chapter. Outside of academia, she enjoys hiking, spending time with her dogs, and traveling internationally.
Lester R. Curtin Award
Samantha Montag earned both her bachelor’s degree (biology, science in human culture) and master’s degree (epidemiology and biostatistics) from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. She has worked in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University since graduating in 2015 and collaborated with researchers studying sleep, cardiovascular disease, and organ transplantation. Montag specializes in data cleaning, data visualization, and survival methods and is fluent in SAS and R. She enjoys teaching and regularly is a teaching assistant for graduate courses in epidemiology and biostatistics. In her spare time, Montag cooks and plays board games.
Munir Winkel is a PhD candidate in statistics at North Carolina State University. While earning his master’s in statistics at the University of Georgia, he worked with researchers at the Rollins School for Public Health at Emory University. In addition to working on his dissertation, which uses a Bayesian approach for design of experiments, he is collaborating with researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Winkel especially enjoys bringing the tools of statistics to help address researchers’ questions.
Lingzi Lu Memorial Award
Lingzi Lu Memorial Award Winner Lingyun Lyu is a second-year master’s student in biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh. Before studying at the University of Pittsburgh, she earned an MS in pharmaceutical science from China Pharmaceutical University and worked as a pharmacist at Nanjing, China. Lingyun is a self-motivated and vibrant student. She is not only the top performer in class, maintaining a GPA of 4.0/4.0, but also actively engages in the application of statistics to real-life research studies. Previously, she worked as a team member on a proteomics project; a paper from this work is under review at Proteomics. Working as a SAS programmer and analyst at the Department of Health Policy and Management, Lyu gained experience in big data management and Medicare data analysis. In addition, she is working on her thesis project, addressing imperfect compliance in clinical trials with noninferiority designs. Recently, she was selected as a graduate student researcher in the school of nursing and appointed as teaching assistant in the department of biostatistics. Lyu’s career goal is to improve public health and well-being as a biostatistician at a health care–related institution.
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