The spring 2026 chapter meeting of the North Texas Chapter was organized as the second annual Dallas and Fort Worth Data Science and Statistics Day (D3), which took place on Thursday, March 26. The event was hosted by the department of statistics and data science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
D3 consisted of a student poster competition, networking dinner, and colloquium talk by Jeffrey S. Morris, professor of public health and preventive medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
Student Poster Competition
Twenty-three undergraduate and graduate students participated in the poster competition representing SMU, The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Texas at Arlington, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Paycom, BNSF Railway, Fort Worth Public Library, and Verizon.
The judging committee was organized by Steven Chiou, assistant professor of statistics at SMU. Morris, Kevin Lutz (UTSW), Aishwary Pawar (SMU), Chuan-Fa Tang (UTD), Manogna Bobbala (Prudential Financial), Wei Jiang (UTA), Jie Sun (SMU), and Marcin Jurek (SMU) served as judges.
First place was awarded to Xin Feng (UTD); second place winners were Sayoni Chakraborty (UTD) and Alain Areeba Siddiqui (UTA); third place winners were Zainab Siddiqui (UTA), Haoyao Ruan (UTA), and Anne Hulme (SMU); and honorable mentions included Art Taychameekiatchai (SMU/UTSW), Wenqisi Pan (UTA), Aiden Berry (SMU), and Dhruva Mellacheruvu (UTD).
Colloquium Talk
Morris gave a talk titled “Seeing Through Epidemiologic Fallacies: How Statistics Safeguards Scientific Communication in a Polarized Era.” He used COVID-19 and vaccine-safety case studies to highlight foundational pitfalls in statistics such as base-rate fallacy, Simpson’s paradox, and misaligned case/control time periods to demonstrate how they can manufacture spurious associations due to confounders.
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