Megan Othus reports:

The 2019 Annual Meeting of the WNAR/IMS was hosted by Oregon Health Science University from June 23–26, with over 280 participants. In addition to WNAR’s yearly partnership with IMS, this year we also partnered with the Japanese Region (JR) of IBS to promote international collaborations. There were 29 invited sessions (24 WNAR, three IMS and two JR), two invited panels, eight student paper sessions, and five contributed sessions. We also had 20 posters during our poster session.

Professor Bin Yu (University of California, Berkeley) gave the Presidential Invited Address: “Three Principles of Data Science: Predictability, Computability, and Stability.”

Three short courses were offered: “Teaching Statistics and Data Science with R/RStudio” by Nicholas Horton (Amherst College) and Kelly McConville (Reed College), “Mediation Analysis and Software with Applications to Explore Health Disparities” by Qingzhao Yu and Bin Li (Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center), and “A Gradual introduction to Shiny” by Ted Laderas and Jessica Minnier (Oregon Health and Science University).

WNAR thanks Program Chair Meike Niederhausen and Local Organizer Byung Park Kong (both from Oregon Health & Science University) for their efforts.

2019 WNAR/IMS Student Paper Competition

Thirty-eight students participated in the student paper competition at the 2019 WNAR/IMS/JR conference. The winner in the written category was Tiffany Tang, University of California, Berkeley (“Integrated Principal Components Analysis”). There were three winners (tied) in the oral category: Natalie Gasca, University of Washington (“Using dimension-reduction methods to identify interpretable diet patterns related to body mass index (BMI) in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA)”), Evan Rosenman, Stanford University (“Propensity Score Methods for Merging Observational and Experimental Datasets”), and Justin Williams, University of California, Los Angeles (“Maximum Likelihood Estimation of a Truncated Normal Distribution with Censored Data”). The students received their award at the conference banquet [pictured below].

We give a special thanks to the chair of the student paper competition, Jessica Minnier from Oregon Health Sciences University and the other Student Competition judges: Harold Bae (Oregon State University), Lisa Brown (Seattle Genetics), Charlotte Gard (New Mexico State University), Chad He (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), Ying Lu (Stanford University), Camille Moore (National Jewish Hospital), John Rice (University of Colorado Anschultz Medical Campus [CU Anschutz]), Laura Saba (CU Anschutz), Krithika Suresh (CU Anschutz), Fan Yang (CU Anschutz), and Wen Zhou (Colorado State University).