The Section on Statistics in Epidemiology (SIE) honored M. Elizabeth (Betz) Halloran with the 2019 Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award for her landmark contributions to statistical methods for infectious disease epidemiology, for her applications of those methods to important scientific problems, and for her service to the statistics in epidemiology community.

Halloran is a longtime leader in statistical methods for infectious disease epidemiology and has profoundly influenced this field. She has earned international recognition for her work on study designs for estimating the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccination. She has spearheaded the analysis of numerous vaccine studies, which have provided evidence to drive key policy decisions. In addition, Halloran’s work has led to advances in causal inference for infectious disease transmission dynamics and vaccine effects, and more generally to causal inference under interference.

Halloran is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, Royal Statistical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, she was awarded the NIH/NIAID MERIT Award for methods for evaluating vaccine efficacy. In addition to having authored numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, Halloran is the first author of the book Design and Analysis of Vaccine Studies—a leading resource on statistical methods for vaccine studies. Halloran is the founder and director of the Summer Institute in Statistics and Modeling in Infectious Diseases, a three-week summer course that both introduces infectious disease researchers to modern methods of statistical analysis and mathematical modeling and introduces statisticians and mathematical modelers to the statistical and dynamic problems posed by modern infectious disease data.

Halloran earned her MD from the Freie Universitat Berlin in 1983 and her DSc in population sciences from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1989. She is a full member of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division and Public Health Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She is also a professor in the departments of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Washington.

2019 Young Investigator Awards

The section also grants an annual Young Investigator Award to new researchers for the best papers in statistics in epidemiology presented at JSM. Among the Young Investigator Award winners, the Breslow Award further recognizes the top paper.

The section honored the following individuals with the 2019 Young Investigator Award:

Tat-Thang Vo, Ghent University (Breslow Award Winner)
Jaffer Zaidi, Harvard University
Nicole Butera, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bo Zhang, University of Pennsylvania
Lianne Siegel, University of Minnesota
Prosenjit Kundu, The Johns Hopkins University

An awards ceremony will be held at this year’s JSM in Denver for the presentation of the Nathan Mantel Award and 2019 Young Investigator awards. The date and location for the ceremony will be announced on the section’s website once available.