2023 Biostatistics Student Awards
External Awards
Jesus M. Luevano, MD was selected as part of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Third cohort of FORWARD scholars, aiming to support URM physician scientists, one of 14 selected from national application process. He was also invited to give an oral abstract presentation at the 2023 DREAM Conference on "The salivary microbiome as a predictor for Barrett's Esophagus"
Emily Potts was awarded as a Tow Doctoral Scholar, a program focused on identifying and cultivating a small group of promising masters’ students from within the Mailman School. The grant supports professional opportunities, mentorship, and the first two years of their five-year doctoral program.
Rebecca Silva, PhD, received first place in the Biopharmaceutical Section of the ASA 2023 student paper competition for their paper “Estimation and Sequential Forecast of Disease Progression in the Absence of True Disease State Process”.
Zexi Cai received one of the International Biometric Society Eastern North American Region’s (ENAR) Distinguished Student Paper Awards for the ENAR 2024 Spring Meeting
Bin Yang received the ICHPS 2023 student travel award this year for their work on precision medicine with Dr. Yuanjia Wang.
Biostatistics Department Doctoral Awards
The Sanford Bolton-John Fertig Award in Biostatistics
The Sanford Bolton-John Fertig Award in Biostatistics is awarded to the top doctoral dissertation in Biostatistics, in recognition of the strong influence John Fertig had on students through his encouragement, help, and outstanding teaching.
Tianchen Xu, PhD for, “Statistical Methods for Learning Patients Heterogeneity and Treatment Effects to Achieve Precision Medicine” under the dissertation advisement of Yuanjia Wang
Tianchen’s dissertation, under Professor Yuanjia Wang’s supervision, provides new methods for examining microbiome data, and for testing causal effects using within-person matching for EHR data. She demonstrates a positive result for stimulants. Tianchen also creates an R package for applications. Her work is an excellent demonstration of the high quality cherished by the Bolton-Fertig award.
The Joseph L. Fleiss Memorial Prize in Biostatistics
The Joseph L. Fleiss Memorial Prize in Biostatistics is awarded to a Biostatistics student whose outstanding dissertation advances statistical methods and their applications to biomedicine and public health
Yujing Yao, PhD, for, “Statistical Analysis of Large Scale Data with Perturbation Subsampling” under the dissertation advisement of ZheZhen Jin
Yujing, sponsored by Professor Zhezhen Jin, developed innovative sampling methods to deal with computational challenges in large data. She provides substantial theoretical development of algorithms which are shown to perform work well, and capable presentation of results under several settings. Her dissertation is methodologically broad, with wide-ranging applications in major areas, very much in the spirit of the Fleiss award.
Biostatistics Department Masters Awards
2023 Chair’s Award for Outstanding Master’s Student
Alexander Furuya, MS, for, “Quantifying and Validating Pace of Aging Using Framingham Heart Study” under the faculty advisement of Christine Mauro
Alexander Furuya (MPH) quantifies the speed of biological decline using advanced mixed effect models.He applied Pace of Aging methodology, suitably adapted, to over four decades of longitudinal data from the Framingham Study Offspring Cohort. From over three dozen candidate biomarkers he identified a set of 20 that showed approximate linear age patterning over multiple waves. Slopes from fitted mixed-effects models were aggregated together across the biomarker panel to form the Framingham Pace of Aging measure (FHPoA). The FHPoA was then validated with clinical data on mortality, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and other outcomes. The sophisticated multi-step approach of this innovative and wide-ranging paper is explained with admirable clarity.
Juyoung Hahm, MS, for, “Comparative Validation of AI and non-AI Methods in MRI Volumetry to Diagnose Parkinsonian Syndromes” under the faculty advisement of Ying Wei
To enhance the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Parkinson’s plus syndromes (P-plus), Juyoung Ham and colleagues compared the performance of deep learning (DL) models in brain MRI segmentation with the gold-standard non-DL method. Dice (reproducibility) scores for two DL models were high (>0.85) and their AUCs for disease classification not inferior to the gold-standard non-DL model, FreeSurfer (FS). Additional tests showed that DL significantly reduces analysis time without compromising brain segmentation performance and differential diagnosis. These findings may contribute to the adoption of DL brain MRI segmentation in clinical settings.
Jimmy Kelliher, MS, for, “Inverting Hypothesis Tests to Generate Confidence Intervals for Indirect Effects in Causal Mediation Analysis” under the faculty advisement of Caleb Miles
Jimmy Kelliher’s methodologically innovative project proposes a novel procedure to generate confidence intervals for indirect effects in settings with multiple independent mediators via hypothesis test inversion. These confidence intervals can then be used for hypothesis testing to detect the presence of indirect effects. Simulation analysis shows that the corresponding tests are more powerful than the conventional delta method and more computationally efficient than the bootstrap alternative.
Inaugural CBARS Poster Competition Winners:
Zexi Cai won for their poster, “Sequential Prediction of Disease Progression in the Absence of True Disease State Process”
Yuqi Miao received an honorable mention for their poster, “Disease Subtyping Using Multi-omics Data through PartIES: a framework Partition-level Integration using diffusion-Enhanced Similarities Learning
Zain Khan received an honorable mention for their poster, “QUACC: Quantile Association via Conditional Concordance”
Yanran Li received an honorable mention for their poster, “Impacts of censes differential privacy for small-area disease mapping to monitor health inequities”