2024 Biostatistics Faculty Awards and Leadership Activities

Gave the J. Warren Perry Distinguished Lecture, School of Public Health and Health Professions at State University of New York – Buffalo (November 8, 2024) on "Modeling Complex Data Structures in Environmental Epidemiology and Climate Science: A Transdisciplinary Approach in the Era of Data Science".
Served as Co-Chair, STATFEST 2024 Local Organizing Committee (Co-host of event at Columbia University) – organized annually by ASA Committee on Minorities,
Appointed as Co-Chair, Scientific Advisory Board, Joint BUSPH-HSPH (Boston U and Harvard) Research Coordinating Center (CAFÉ RCC) of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative [2023- Present]
Appointed as Member, Scientific Advisory Committee, MRC International Statistics & Epidemiology Partnership – ISEP, [2024-2028]
Served on Expert panel of American Statistical Association on “Impacts of our Changing Climate on Human and Animal Health Roundtable”, ASA Headquarters, Alexandria, VA [Nov 13-14, 2024]

Appointed to the Editorial Board of Neuropsychopharmacology, a top psychiatry journal with strong statistical methods.

Awarded the 2024 Statistics in Biosciences Best Paper Award along with Junyi Zhang, Zimian Wang, and Zhiliang Ying for their paper, A Step-Wise Multiple Testing for Linear Regression Models with Application to the Study of Resting Energy Expenditure, in Statistics in Biosciences, Vol. 15, Issue 1.
Elected as the Statistical Editor for the Journal of American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions.
Appointed as the guest editor of the special issue of Journal of Data Science on Statistical Frontiers of Data Science
Appointed as the guest editor of the special issue of Lifetime Data Analysis on the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Lifetime Data Science section of the American Statistical Association
Delivered the Shoemaker Lecture at Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH during April 11-12, 2024.

Gained the position of Associate Editor, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference

Received a Department Grant Writing Initiative (DeGRI) award for their co-PI project entitled, "From Low-Quality to High Impact: AI-Based Image Enhancement for Breast Cancer Screening Equity." They aim to leverage generative AI technologies to develop tools for enhancing the quality of mammogram images and subsequently improving breast cancer risk prediction accuracy. The Department Grant Writing Initiative (DeGRI) awards are a Biostatistics Department award to provide protected time and support critical research activities needed for grant preparations.

Won the Medallion Award and was named Lecturer, Institute of Mathematical Statistics Annual Meeting, Salzburg, Austria, 2026 (conferred 2024).
Appointed the International Francqui Chair Professorship (3-6 month visit, KU-Leuven, Belgium, during 2024-2026).
Keynote speaker at the Fifth International Workshop on Statistical Analyses of Multi-Outcome Data (SAM 2024) in Salzburg, Austria, where he gave a talk titled, "Nonparametric methods for wearable device data".
Invited speaker at the conference honoring Basu and Bahadur: Theory and Foundations of Statistics in the Era of Big Data at Florida State University.
Invited seminar speaker at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University College Dublin, Ireland; the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo, Norway; and the Department of Mathematical Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Won an Innovation in Teaching Award from Columbia Public Health for his Introduction to Mathematical Statistics Course.

Elected as Council of Sections Representative for the ASA Mental Health Statistics Section.
Elected as Program Chair – Elect for the Mobile & Wearable Data Science Interest Group.
Co-organizing a workshop on “Emerging Statistical Methods for Digital Health Data” that will take place in February 2025 in Banff (BIRS facility at The Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, Canada), as part of the efforts to create a Mobile & Wearable Data Science Interest Group at the ASA.
Gained the position of co-editor of the Data Science section of the journal Current Environmental Health Reports.
Appointed member of the Environmental Justice Oversight Panel of the Health Effects Institute

Selected as Program Chair for the ICSA China conference which will take place in June 2025. She has also been elected to the ICSA Board of Directors.

Won a Calderone Junior Facutly Award for 2024-2025.
Recipient of a Department Grant Writing Initiative (DeGRI) award for the project, "Establishing a synthetic control framework to evaluate long-term effects of tropical cyclones on individual chronic health conditions in the United States.” The Department Grant Writing Initiative (DeGRI) awards are a Biostatistics Department award to provide protected time and support critical research activities needed for grant preparations.