AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
Minutes of the ASA Biometrics Section Mixer and Open Business Meeting
Joint Statistical Meetings
Denver, CO
Monday, 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
August 4, 2008
Convention Center - 208
Present: (to be filled in)
1. Welcome and Introductions (Taylor)
Section Chair Jeremy Taylor called the meeting to order at 6:00pm, welcomed everyone, and introduced the members of the Executive Committee.
2. Review and Approval of Previous Minutes (Cai)
Secretary/Treasurer Jianwen Cai drew attention to copies of the August 2007 (Salt Lake City JSM) Business Meeting minutes that had been distributed. The minutes were approved by unanimous vote.
3. Election Results and Appointments (Heitjan)
Chair-elect Dan Heitjan reported the following election results:
Chair-elect-elect: Barry Graubard;
Secretary/Treasurer: Tom Belin;
COS Rep (2009-2011): Denise Roe.
Dan Heitjan has also made the following appointments:
JSM 2009 Biometrics Section Program Chair:
Wensheng Guo (Penn State University);
Section's representative to the 2009 ENAR Meeting Program Committee:
Jinbo Chen (Penn State University).
Dan Heitjan also introduced Jerry Heatley of Thoratec Corp as the appointment for 2009-10 Continuing Education Chair.
Dan Heitjan invited members to volunteer services to the Section and ASA.
4. Treasurer’s Report (Cai)
Treasurer Jianwen Cai reported that Section finances remain strong, with a current balance of more than $38,000 (the balance at the end of 2007 is over $35,000). The balance is reduced from the previous year as planned. The major revenue for last year is from CE income ($3,485.42), member dues ($3,012), and interest ($1,381.34). Expenditures include strategic initiatives ($9,000), Byar Awards ($1,500), and JSM-related expenses.
Jianwen noted that ASA does not want the Sections to have a balance which is more than twice the operation expenses. The Executive Committee will keep this in mind for possible ways to use the section’s funds to benefit members. Jeremy acknowledged Jianwen for her service as Secretary/Treasure for the past two years.
5. Council of Sections Report (Miglioretti/Daniels)
Diana Miglioretti attended the Council of Sections meeting held on Sunday. Diana reported the following:
There are 2 new proposed Sections: (1) Statistical Learning and Data Mining; and (2) Statistical Programming. The COS will vote on these 2 proposed sections in October. Members of ASA may form a section if they have the majority vote of COS, petition of 100+ names, proposed charter, and proposed officers. They can also form an Interest group with at least 25 members with interest in the topic (the term is 3 years which can be renewed). The Executive Committee is supportive of the Statistical Learning and Data Mining section and is not sure about the Statistical Programming Section, since this seems to overlap with the computing and graphics sections. The members who attended the business meeting are supportive of the Executive Committee decision.
ASA’s open meetings were not well attended in the past. This year, ASA is having virtual open meeting. The virtual open meeting is open during JSM and shortly afterwards. Members can email suggestions/comments to the ASA Executive Director, Ron Wasserstein, at ron@amstat.org at any time.
Only 50% of the ASA membership belongs to any Section. This is most likely not for financial reasons. ASA will start collecting more information about the membership. We should encourage our colleagues to join the Biometrics section and other sections of interest.
Webinars have been very successful in Biopharm Section. The advantages of the Webinars are that the charge could be small to attend and people can attend and present from anywhere. Members are in general supportive of the Executive Committee to look into organizing/co-sponsoring a webinar.
New ASA Director of Science Policy, Steve Pierson, is willing to meet with people if they are in D.C. He wants to go to the Congress next year when JSM is in D.C. He wants feedback on what issues he should bring up to the Congress. The Executive Committee decided to invite the Science Policy Director, Steve Pierson, to the Section’s Monday mixer next year.
There are 5 specific questions that the Council seeks feedback from each Section. (1) What are the ways to attract new members and provide member benefits? (A couple of ideas from the Executive Committee are (a) Computing Section should reach out to MS-level biostatisticians; and (b) promote overview tutorial sessions and lectures that are geared toward MS-level biostatisticians.) (2) Should ASA generate revenue by providing staff services to other organizations? (The Executive Committee is not in favor of this) (3) What are the topics that the ASA Director of Science Policy, Steve Pierson, should bring to the Congress to influence decision making? (4) Examples for statistical moments? (5) Any additional comments about the 2 new sections?
Section members are encouraged to send responses to these questions through email to Diana Miglioretti and Mike Daniels.
6. Conferring of David Byar Young Investigator Award/Travel Award (Taylor)
Jeremy Taylor acknowledged Tom TenHave for chairing 2008 Byar Award Committee and the committee members. The competition had included 30 paper submissions; in addition to the Byar Award, 3 Travel Award winners had been named. The Byar Award winner was Rebecca Hubbard, University of Washington, for the paper "Modeling risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease progression using a non-homogeneous Markov process". The three Travel award winners are: Ronglai Shen, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, for the paper "Reconstructing Tumor-wise Protein Expression in Tissue Microarray Studies Using a Bayesian Cell Mixture Model"; Hongyu Miao, University of Rochester, for the paper "Differential Equation Modeling of HIV Viral Fitness Experiments: Model Identification, Model Selection, and Multi-Model Inference"; and Megan Othus, Harvard University, for the paper "A Class of Semiparametric Mixture Cure Survival Models with Dependent Censoring". Jeremy called the winners to the front in turn to receive an award plaque, monetary prize, and the group's congratulations. Hubbard's cash award was $1000; Shen, Miao, and Othus's cash awards were $500 each.
7. USMLE Content Coverage in Biostatistics and Epidemilogy (Imery)
Peter Imery invited a special guest David Swanson from the National Board of Medical Examiners to speak to members about the board exam which covers some basic concepts in Biostatistics and Epidemiology. David Swanson gave the members some background information about the exam and showed members some example questions in the past exams. He encouraged members to send him information about what is important to cover in the exam. He also encouraged members to volunteer to write some questions. He can be reached at dwanson@nbme.org.
8. Publications Report (Taylor for Gueorguieva)
Jeremy Taylor reported on behalf of Ralitza Gueorguieva that the Section publishes the Section Newsletter monthly online. The Section will start to send the newsletter through email as well.
9. JSM 2008 Program (Taylor for Ghosh)
Jeremy Taylor reported on behalf of Debashis Ghosh that Biometrics Section had sponsored 7 invited sessions (5 invited sessions, 1 invited panel, and 1 invited poster presentation), 10 topic-contributed sessions, and 31 regular contributed sessions. The topics covered for the 7 invited sessions include statistical methods for multivariate dental data, directing a Biostatistics core in biomedical research, challenges of statistical inference in ‘large p, small n’ problems, new statistical and computation methods for analysis of genomic data with a graphical structure, a new paradigm of statistical data analysis, and time series analysis via mechanistic models. The Section also co-sponsored many invited, topic-contributed, panels, contributed, and poster sessions. Overall, the Biometrics Section has sponsored or co-sponsored a total of 136 talk sessions, panels, or posters.
10. ENAR 2008 Program (Taylor for Johnson)
Jeremy Taylor reported on behalf of Tim Johnson for the ENAR 2008 program: The Biometrics Section had sponsored or co-sponsored 22 sessions. The topics of the Biometrics Section sponsored or co-sponsored invited sessions include Joint models for Surrogate and Final Outcomes, Recent Advances in Analyzing Biomarker Data with Limits of Detection, Nonparametric Bayes, Statistical Issues in Genomic Studies, Model Validation and Model Selection in Longitudinal Studies, Regularization and Hierarchical Modeling, Model Selection for High Dimensional Data with Practical Solutions, Advances in Survival Analysis of Large Dimensional Data, Recent Developments in Non-Smooth Estimating Functions for Censored Data, Longitudinal Data Analysis in the Presence of Mortality, Bayesian Variable Selection with High Dimensional Covariate Data, Methods for Analyzing Multi-Reader ROC Data, Advanced Semiparametric Modeling of Genetics/Genomic Data, Analysis of Recurrent Marker Data, Variable Selection and Dimension Reduction in Genomic, Statistical Learning in Biological Signals and Images, Nonparametric Regression for Survival Analysis, Multistate Approach towards Modeling Complex Biomedical Data, Dynamic Treatment Regimes, Recent Advances in Graphs/Graphical Models for Genetic Network Analysis, New Statistical Methods for Biomedical Imaging Data, and Statistical Challenges in Genomewide Association Studies. The Section also sponsored numerous poster and contributed sessions.
11. JSM 2009 Program (Taylor for Guo)
Jeremy Taylor reported on behalf of Wensheng Guo: The deadline for proposals submission is 9/9/08. We already received 10 proposals and have tentatively chosen the four allocated sessions. They are on 1) functional data analysis, 2) dimension reduction, 3) analysis on genomics data and 4) causal inference. We continue to receive proposals and will wait till the deadline to finalize the sessions and to decide on the two additional competitive sessions.
12. ENAR 2009 Program (Taylor for Chen)
Jeremy Taylor reported on behalf of Jinbo Chen for the ENAR 2009 Program: Jinbo has put together a session on Statistical Methods for Genomewide Association Studies in the IMS Section. For the Biometrics Section, she invited 6 proposals. The topics include Causal Inference with Instrumental Variables Methods, Survival Methods for Robustly Modeling Time-Varying Covariate Effects, Outcome Dependent Sampling, Statistical Methods in Genome-Wide Gene Regulation Studies, New Statistical Methods for Detecting Epistasis Interactions in Genome-Wide Association Studies, and Recent Advances in Meta-Analysis.
13. Continuing Education Report (Tadesse/Heatley)
Mahlet Tadesse reported: for JSM 2008, Biometrics Section put in two short course proposals and one was accepted. The short course is on Proteomics, by Scott Schmidler. Forty-one registered and 38 attended.
For JSM 2009, the Committee has selected 4 potential courses for JSM 2009. Jerry Heatley was tasked with obtaining more details on each course so that the Committee can select 1-3 courses for ASA to consider.
14. Strategic Initiatives: Current and Future (LaFleur/Taylor/Heitjan)
Bonnie LaFleur reported that the Strategic Initiative Subcommittee has 5 members and has conference call once every three months. In 2006, there were 7 applications and 2 were funded. Last year, there were only 3 applications and all 3 were funded. The Subcommittee will work on other ways to inform people. They will also look for ways to work with other Sections and possibilities to partner with ASA. They will reach out to try to get people interested. Bonnie encouraged members to consider submitting applications. The previously funded projects have been very successful. The Biometrics Section will organize a topic contributed session or panel discussion for JSM 2009 with 5-6 previously Biometrics Section sponsored strategic initiatives.
Page Moore and Song Ounpraseuth from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences were invited to share their experience with the members about reaching out to high school AP statistics class students in Arkansas.
15. Other Business (All)
Dan Heitjan is compiling a list of former Section officers. This will be helpful for future nomination for section officers. Dan is able to find information on former section officers up to 5 years ago and he encourages members to send him information.
16. Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned at 7:00pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Jianwen Cai
Secretary/Treasurer
Biometrics Section