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SPAIG Award Goes to Two

1 November 2019 1,062 views No Comment

Ying Ding, University of Pittsburgh; Willis Jensen, WL Gore and Associates; Julia Lee, Northwestern University; and Fanni Natanegara, Eli Lilly and Company

    Winners of the SPAIG Award: Ying Huang, Zoe Moodie, and Ming Zhu. Not pictured are Brenda Price, Carlos DiazGranados, Youyi Fong, Peter Gilbert, Michal Juraska, Edith Langevin, Tifany Machabert, Stephen Savarino, and Saranya Sridhar.

    Winners of the SPAIG Award: Benjamin Baumer, Andrea Foulkes, Nicholas Horton, and Ethan Meyers. Not pictured are Krista Gile, David Jensen, Andrew McCallum, Sears Merritt, Nick Reich, Gareth Ross, and Amy Wagaman.

      Established in 2002, the Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award highlights outstanding partnerships among academe, industry, and government organizations, as well as promotes new partnerships among these organizations. This award is distinct from other ASA awards in that it recognizes outstanding collaborations between organizations, while recognizing key individual contributors.

      Two SPAIG awards were presented during the 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Denver, Colorado. Both winners have equally demonstrated impactful collaboration across two or more sectors.

      Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Sanofi Pasteur began their partnership in 2013 when Sanofi Pasteur was testing a candidate vaccine in randomized, placebo-controlled efficacy trials. An objective of these efficacy trials was to assess neutralizing antibody markers as predictors of dengue disease, surrogate endpoints for dengue disease, and modifiers of vaccine efficacy against dengue disease, accounting for the four dengue serotypes and genetic diversity of dengue.

      Fred Hutchinson Key Contributors
      Yunda Huang (nominator), Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
      Peter Gilbert, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
      Ming Zhu, Sanofi Pasteur
      Brenda Price, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
      Carlos DiazGranados, Sanofi Pasteur
      Youyi Fong, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
      Ying Huang, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
      Michal Juraska, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
      Edith Langevin, Sanofi Pasteur
      Tifany Machabert, Sanofi Pasteur
      Zoe Moodie, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
      Stephen Savarino, Sanofi Pasteur
      Saranya Sridhar, Sanofi Pasteur

      Five College/MassMutual Key Contributors
      Benjamin Baumer (nominator), Smith College
      Nicholas J. Horton (nominator), Amherst College
      Andrea Foulkes, Mount Holyoke College
      Amy Wagaman, Amherst College
      Ethan Meyers, Hampshire College
      Nicholas Reich, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
      Krista Gile, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
      Brant Cheikes, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
      Gareth Ross, MassMutual Financial Group
      Sears Merritt, MassMutual Financial Group

      Fred Hutchinson statistics group specializes in statistical methods for this objective, so a partnership was launched to tackle the objective with a short-term goal that Fred Hutch would provide statistical consultation to Sanofi Pasteur on issues pertaining to design optimization for their randomized, placebo-controlled phase 3 trials of the CYD-TDV dengue vaccine and establish a framework for a correlate of protection analysis to ensure Sanofi Pasteur developed an optimal blood sampling strategy for their dengue vaccine efficacy trials. The long-term goal was for Fred Hutch to provide and apply analytical methods to Sanofi Pasteur’s neutralizing antibody assay data, provide viral sequence analysis, provide “sieving analysis,” and generate methodology for meta-analysis for the dengue vaccine efficacy trials.

      Peter Gilbert from Fred Hutchinson said the major benefits from the collaboration are it “facilitated a more robust set of statistical analyses of critical questions in dengue vaccination, helping solidify conclusions about safety and efficacy of Sanofi Pasteur’s vaccine that were broadly discussed by advisory boards and regulatory bodies, and affected global recommendations for appropriate use of the licensed vaccine.” Gilbert continued, “The partnership improved statistical methods development at the Fred Hutchinson and University of Washington PhD biostatistics students in training by ensuring all methodological decisions were grounded in the ongoing clinical and laboratory science and realities of the clinical trials. The partnership also facilitated technology transfer of statistical methods and R packages to Sanofi Pasteur that may be useful for other vaccine trials.”

      The most rewarding aspects of the collaboration according to Gilbert are “building trusting relationships with mutual respect around the integrity of the science and sticking with the collaboration through some intense periods and ups and downs.”

      SPAIG’s mission is to promote initiatives that foster statistical partnerships or collaborations. Gilbert’s advice to individuals and organizations looking to be more collaborative is to have a “handful of in-person meetings visiting each other’s institutions and giving seminars and having broad discussion, as well as having social time to get to know each other.” He also added, “It helps to have a disposition of being open and flexible, with enough humility about one’s own preferred statistical approaches that multiple approaches can be applied, with their different assumptions and pros/cons described and discussed in a non-defensive manner.”

      The second award went to Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and MassMutual Financial Group. They represent a public-private partnership that has promoted the rapid growth of the statistics and data science community in Western Massachusetts in the last five years. Highlights of their mutual beneficial partnership include the following:

      • Ten-year, $15 million grant from the MassMutual Foundation to the UMass Center for Data Science that has been used to hire new faculty and launch a new graduate concentration in data science
      • Four-year, $2 million women in data science grant from MassMutual to Mt. Holyoke and Smith colleges used to hire new temporary faculty and launch majors in statistics and data science
      • MassMutual Data Science Development Program (DSDP), an innovative three-year work-study training program that recruits recent Five College graduates, hires them as junior data scientists, and enrolls them in graduate programs at UMass
      • Sponsorship of the ASA Five College DataFest, which is one of the largest in the country, by MassMutual

      This collaboration began when Andrew Bray (then a Five College post-doc) approached Gareth Ross of MassMutual seeking sponsorship of the inaugural Five College DataFest. Ross and Merritt Sears of MassMutual launched the Data Science Development Program in the summer of 2014 based on a proposal written by Bray and Ben Baumer. The first cohort included seven recent undergraduates from the Five Colleges.

      Sears noted that “seeing both organizations grow their data science capabilities in such meaningful and impactful ways has been a tremendously rewarding experience.” The major benefits that have come from this collaboration are “the creation of a strong talent pipeline and development program curriculum taught by academic experts,” according to Sears. For those seeking collaborations, Sears also noted “it is important to identify shared goals and collaborate with a partner that can help achieve those goals, using skills and capabilities that are additive to your own.”

      Baumer, of Smith College, said, “The funding of visiting assistant professor positions at Smith and Mount Holyoke by MassMutual have been hugely important to helping both schools develop majors in (statistics and) data science.” Baumer also noted that “Smith has sent several of our graduates through the MassMutual Data Science Development Program, and it has been very gratifying to see their success in that competitive industry while they are simultaneously pursuing a graduate degree.”

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