The Western North American Region of The International Biometric Society (WNAR) jointly holds an annual meeting with IMS. Megan Othus reports from the most recent meeting, in June:

The 2018 Annual Meeting of the WNAR/IMS was hosted in Edmonton by the University of Alberta from June 25–27, with over 100 participants.

The meeting began with two short courses: “Statistical Challenges for Neuroimaging Data Analysis” presented by Linglong Kong from the University of Alberta and “Individual-level Transmission Process Modelling: Epidemics, Invasive Species and Beyond” presented by Rob Deardon from the University of Calgary. Ross Prentice from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center presented the WNAR Presidential Invited Address, “A Marginal Modeling Approach to the Analysis of Multivariable Failure Time Regression Data.”

Ross Prentice giving the Presidential Invited Address.

The conference included seven invited sessions sponsored by WNAR, one invited session sponsored by IMS, six student paper competition oral sessions, and three contributed paper sessions.

WNAR thanks Adam Kashlak for his efforts as the Program Chair, and Jei Jiang and Linglong Kong (all three from University of Alberta) for their efforts as Local Organizers.

Conference participants enjoying the WNAR mixer

An unexpected fire alarm caused participants to evacuate the building

Student Paper Competition

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s student paper competition. The Most Outstanding Written Paper winners (tied) were Anu Mishra from the University of Washington for her paper “Weighted Recalibration for Improved Clinical Utility of Risk Scores” and Katherine Wilson from the University of Washington for her paper “Child Mortality Estimation Incorporating Birth History Data.” The Most Outstanding Oral Presentation winner was Phuong Vu from University of Washington for presentation “Probabilistic Predictive Principal Components Analysis for Spatially Misaligned and High-Dimensional Air Pollution Data with Missing Observations.” The Distinguished Oral Presentation winner was Kelsey Grinde from the University of Washington for her presentation “Controlling for Multiple Testing in Genome-Wide Admixture Mapping Studies. The students received their award at the conference banquet.

We give a special thanks to the chair of the student paper competition, Jessica Minnier from Oregon Health Sciences University. We also thank the team of student paper reviewers and judges for the students’ oral presentations and papers: Harold Bae from Oregon State University, Charlotte Gard from New Mexico State University, Katerina Kechris from University of Colorado Anschultz Medical Campus, Miguel Marino from Oregon Health Science University, and Byung Park from Oregon Health Sciences University.

Student paper competition winners