Chaitra H. Nagaraja

The ASA Scientific and Public Affairs Advisory Committee has sponsored the annual Statistical Significance competition since 2009. This year, there were 32 participants in the competition. Each submitted a one-page piece explaining how their research connects to society and presented their work during a poster session at the joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto, Ontario.

Two competitors took first-place with projects inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic: Shinpei Nakamura-Sakai from Yale University and Madeline Ward from the University of Calgary. Each winner received $200.

Nakamura-Sakai is a PhD student in statistics who earned an MS in statistics from The University of Chicago. He has a background in finance with research interests spanning causal inference to sports. Nakamura-Sakai’s project, “Estimating Causal Effects of Interventions Altering Social Connectivity Patterns Under Network Interference,” focused on creating a theoretical framework linking people’s social networks, individual behavior, and resulting disease transmission patterns.

Ward is a PhD student in biostatistics who earned her BSc and MSc in applied statistics from the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on modeling infectious disease transmission, often using Bayesian methods. Ward’s project, “Incorporating Behavioral Change into Infectious Disease Transmission Models” looked at modeling and forecasting disease transmission after a public health intervention while integrating changing rates of adherence to that intervention.