WNAR (the Western North American Region of The International Biometric Society) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics combine each year to hold the IMS-sponsored WNAR/IMS meeting: this year it was in the lovely location of Honolulu, Hawaii. Wesley Johnson, professor of statistics at the University of California, Irvine, was one of the organizers. He reports:

Major features of the annual WNAR/IMS conferences have been the high quality sessions, the relatively small but not too small size, and typically wonderful venues. The 2014 WNAR/IMS Conference was no exception. It was hosted by the Department of Public Health Sciences and Office of Public Health Studies from June 15-18, 2014, in Honolulu, Hawaii at the Campus Center on the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus. This was a very well attended conference despite the obvious distractibility of beautiful Hawaii. There were five invited IMS sessions interspersed among twelve invited WNAR sessions and twelve contributed sessions. The WNAR Presidential Invited Address was given by Christl Donnelly from Imperial College London on the topic “Statistical Challenges in Understanding Disease Transmission and Control.” An all-day short course was given by Thomas Lumley from the University of Auckland entitled “Introduction to large-scale genetic association studies.”

The IMS invited sessions were:

• Statistical Methods for Applications in High-Dimensional and Complex Problems (Organizer: Z. John Daye; University of Arizona)
• Hypothesis testing and estimation for kernel-based regression models and other models under non-regular conditions (Organizers: Youyi Fong and Chongzhi Di; Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)
• Bayesian Approaches for Inference with Instrumental Variables (Organizer: Prakash Laud; Medical University of Wisconsin)
• Statistics in Medical Imaging (Organizer: Thomas Lee; UC, Davis)
• Advances in Functional Data Analysis (Organizer: Kathryn Prewitt; Arizona State University)

Full program details for the conference can currently be found at http://manoa.hawaii.edu/publichealth/node/453

The 2015 WNAR/IMS meeting will be at Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, from June 14–17, 2015 [EDIT: was June 21–24]. The Local organizer is Kyungduk Ko. Details to follow.

Pictured below: Scott Bartell and Daniel Gillen (both UC Irvine), and Thomas Lumley (Auckland) in a lively discussion about epidemiologic methods. Lumley was also presenter of a short course on large scale genetic association studies