At the 2022 Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society Annual Meeting in Houston (March 28–30), Michael Hudgens was honored as the winner of the 2019 Kutner Alumni Award and Rajan Patel was honored as the winner of the 2021 Kutner Alumni Award. Both Hudgens and Patel were officially presented with their award plaques by Rob Krafty, chair of the Emory Rollins School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Hudgens earned both his BS and MS degrees in mathematics from the University of Florida and his PhD in biostatistics (2000) from Emory University. His PhD adviser was Elizabeth (Betz) Halloran. From the beginning of his doctoral program, Hudgens worked independently and brought immense technical rigor to each project using his mathematics background. He is an active, productive, and creative methodological researcher having co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in leading statistical journals and high-profile medical journals.
Hudgens became a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2012 and won the Edward G. McGavran Award for Excellence in Teaching at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015. He has taught causal inference in the Summer Institute on Statistics and Modeling of Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington each summer (with one exception when he taught in South Africa) since 2009. Currently, Hudgens is the associate chair of the department of biostatistics at UNC Chapel Hill. He also serves as the biostatistics core director for UNC’s Center for AIDS Research.
Patel earned his BS and MS degrees in computer science from Rice University before entering Emory’s doctoral program in biostatistics in 2002. He earned his doctoral degree in 2006 while working with his adviser, DuBois Bowman, developing novel statistical methods to analyze functional connectivity of the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging data.
Patel worked at Amgen as a senior biostatistician and then a biostatistics manager from 2006–2007. He conducted statistical analyses for early-phase clinical trials and pre-clinical trials. He joined Google in 2007 and was the statistician on the team that developed Google Flu Trends, a publicly available tool that mines Google Search logs for flu-related activity and estimates influenza-like illness rates in the US. He developed the querying model used to predict influenza-like illness rates.
Patel has always been able to combine his deep statistical understanding with his background in computer science to solve hard technical challenges, like understanding the natural language in Search or images with Google Lens to build beautiful and simple products that have affected billions of people. For his numerous contributions to Google over the last 14 years, Patel was promoted to vice president of engineering in the consumer shopping group team leader for Google Search.
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