Biostatistics Staff Recognized at Joint Statistical Meetings

Staff members of the Biostatistics Branch (BB) participated in and received several honors at this summer's 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Miami Beach, Florida. JSM is an annual conference for statisticians with activities that include invited and contributed oral and poster presentations, panel and roundtable discussions, continuing education courses, and a career placement service.

Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D., Chief of BB, was awarded the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies Presidents' Award, and Mitchell H. Gail, M.D., Ph.D., received the Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award for the development of statistical methods for epidemiology. Arpita Ghosh, Ph.D., received a Young Investigator Award from the Statistics in Epidemiology Section of the American Statistical Association, which recognized her contribution as a lead author of the paper "Unified analysis of secondary phenotypes in case-control association studies."

Presentations, posters, and panel discussions made by BB staff at the meeting included the following:

Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D.: "Predicting the future of genetic risk prediction"

Mitchell H. Gail, M.D., Ph.D.: "Risk-based preventive strategies: Improving risk models versus improving interventions" and "Comparative benefits for disease prevention of improved interventions versus more discriminating models of disease risk"

Barry I. Graubard, Ph.D.: "Estimating family aggregation of disease in cross-sectional surveys"

Summer Seongmin Han, Ph.D.: "Likelihood ratio test for detecting gene (G)-environment (E) interactions under additive risk models exploiting G-E independence for case-control studies"

Stephanie Kovalchik, Ph.D.: "Does meta-regression have enough power? An empirical study of 500 meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials"

Victoria Landsman, Ph.D.: "Analysis of case-control studies with sample weights"

Ruth M. Pfeiffer, Ph.D.: "Two criteria for evaluating risk prediction models"

Joshua Sampson, Ph.D.: "Rare variants and searching for associations"

Jianxin Shi, Ph.D.: "Statistical analysis of copy number variations in family-based genome-wide association studies"

Sholom Wacholder, Ph.D.: "Personalized medicine and convergence: Prospects for statisticians"