WNAR Correspondent Professor Jessica Minnier writes:

The 2024 Annual Meeting of the WNAR/IMS was a joint conference with the Graybill Conference hosted by Colorado State University in Fort Collins from June 9–12.

Fort Collins, Colorado

Robert Santos, Director of the US Census Bureau, gave the WNAR Plenary and Presidential Address entitled “Serving Through Leadership: My Approach to Heading a Federal Statistical Agency” and Scott Evans, Professor at George Washington University, gave the Graybill Keynote “The order of operations is important: it is time to correct the clinical trial arithmetic.”

Current and past presidents of WNAR

The meeting began with three short courses: “N-of-1 Trials for Personalized Healthcare” by Christopher Schmid (Brown University), “Small Sample, Sequential, Multiple Assignment, Randomized Trial (snSMART) Designs and Methods for Chronic, Rare Disease Drug Development” by Kelley Kidwell (University of Michigan), and “Bayesian Borrowing Techniques for Rare Disease Clinical Research” by Joseph Koopmeiners and Steffen Ventz (University of Minnesota).

There were 68 invited sessions, 8 contributed sessions, and 11 student paper sessions. There were also three diversity workshops. With 435 participants, this was one of the largest WNAR/IMS annual meetings to date.

WNAR thanks the Program Chairs, Prince Allotey (University of Washington) and Catherine Lee (Kaiser Permanente), the IMS Chair Jie Peng (UC Davis), Local Organizer Wen Zhou (Colorado State University), and the Graybill Program Chair Jingling Ye (BeiGene), for all their efforts.

WNAR Diversity Workshop

U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos speaking to participants of the WNAR Diversity Workshop

The 2024 WNAR Diversity Workshop was the first satellite workshop held in conjunction with WNAR, and it emphasized the importance of mentorship and belonging in the health and science fields as well as introduced various data-centered career pathways. For many of the 16 participants, it was the first time they had attended a scientific conference, and we received many positive comments about how the workshop was organized and facilitated. Most of the students (8 undergrad and 7 grad) were studying in Colorado, and we had many mentors (of the 14 total) who were affiliated with Colorado universities who joined us for our matched-mentorship program. The workshop featured panels on mentorship, training opportunities, career pathways, and graduate school experiences with over 20 panelists. The workshop also included a “Disparities in Epilepsy” talk by Dr. Sonal Bhatia and a “Fireside Chat with Rob Santos,” where the director shared his inspiring life story and advice.

Attendees also had the chance to participate in the Diversity Workshop networking session, WNAR Mixer, and WNAR Student Pizza Social.

WNAR Diversity Workshop participants

The 2024 WNAR Diversity Workshop was made possible by many volunteers, including the WNAR Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Committee and Leadership committee. Special thanks go to Elizabeth Juarez-Colunga, Megan Othus, Jan Dasgupta, Natalie Gasca, Prince Allotey, Audrey Hendricks, and Lala Kaizer for their coordination efforts. We are excited to continue this program at the next WNAR conference.

Student Paper Competition

WNAR Student Winners with President Megan Othus and Student Award Committee Chair Kayleigh Keller

Congratulations to the 42 student participants. Winners of the Student Paper Award were Leah Andrews (University of Washington) “Semiparametric Methods for Evaluating COVID-19 Vaccine Regimens in Test-Negative Designs”, and Navneet Hakhu (UC Irvine) “Censoring-Robust Estimation in Time-to-Event Clinical Trials with Adaptive Randomization”, and [IMS student member] Robin Liu (UC Santa Barbara) “Natural Covariate-adjusted Gaussian Graphical Regression.” The winner of the Student Presentation Award was [IMS member] Evan Sidrow (University of British Columbia), “Stochastic Optimization for Efficient Inference in Ecological Hidden Markov Models.” We give special thanks to the chair of the student paper competition, Kayleigh Keller (Colorado State University), and the 19 judges.

WNAR Student Award participants

Indigenous Student Travel Award

Congratulations to Kyle Conniff who is our first awardee! Kyle Conniff is a PhD candidate of Statistics at UC Irvine, and he is a member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

WNAR/IBS Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship

Dr. Robert Tibshirani of Stanford University was awarded the 2024 WNAR/IBS Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship given his highly impactful research contributions to the fields of biometrics and science at large. Dr. Tibshirani gave a talk in the WNAR Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the JSM entitled “Cooperative learning and cooperative components analysis.”

Sponsorship

Many thanks to our sponsors for WNAR 2024: SAS, BeiGene, Regeneron, Springer, CRC Press, and CURE Epilepsy.