Biometrics Section Mixer & Business Meeting

JSM 2011 — Miami Beach, Florida

Monday, August 1, 2011, 5:30PM–7PM

Room: Loews Miami Beach Hotel – Neptune Room

About 48 people attended the mixer/business meeting

Some of the reported items can be taken from the minutes from the Executive Committee Meeting

1.      Welcome and introductions

Section Chair Jack Lee greeted the roughly 48 members in attendance.  Section officers were identified and introduced.  The section’s slate of officers includes:

• Barry Graubard (Chair, 2010)
• J. Jack Lee (Chair, 2011)
• Dianne Finkelstein (Chair, 2012)
• Jianwen Cai (Chair, 2013)
• Debashis Ghosh (Secretary/Treasurer, 2011–2012)
• Denise Roe (COS Rep, 2009–2011)
• Mousumi Banerjee (COS Rep, 2010–2012)
• Page Moore (COS Rep, 2011–2013)
• Scarlett Bellamy (COS Rep, 2012–2014)
• Tianxi Cai (JSM Program Chair 2011)
• Jason Fine (ENAR Program Chair 2011)
• Timothy Johnson (JSM Program Chair 2012)
• Daniel Scharfstein (ENAR Program Chair 2012)
• Annie Qu (CE Chair, 2011–2012)
• Songthip Ounpraseuth (Publications Officer, 2011–2012)
• Roslyn Stone (Chair, Strategic Initiatives)
• Gerald Beck (On-Line Assistant Editor)

2.      Meetings

• Thanks were offered to program chairs Jason Fine (ENAR 2011), Tianxi Cai (JSM 2011), and Annie Qu (2011, CE).  Tianxi Cai noted that there were over 200 abstracts submitted to the Biometrics Section.  Sponsored sessions included 6 invited, over 20 topic-contributed, and 38 contributed paper sessions.
• Continuing Education 2011/2012 (Qu)  The section’s two short courses this year were given by Charles McCulloch (UC San Francisco) on Generalized Linear Mixed Models and Butch Tsiatis (NC State) on Semiparametric Theory and Missing Data.  It was announced that there is still an opportunity to support CE course ideas, with a September 30 deadline.
• JSM 2012 (Johnson)  Tim Johnson greeted members and noted that there is still an opportunity to submit invited-session proposals for next year’s JSM, with a deadline of September 7.
• ENAR 2012 (Lee for Scharfstein)  Jack Lee noted that Dan Scharfstein is the section’s liaison to the ENAR program committee, with the 2012 ENAR program soon to be finalized.

3.      Award Competition (Graubard)

Barry Graubard reported as the chair of the Byar Award committee, noting that the committee had a very strong set of 26 submitted papers.  The Byar Award was given to Daniela Witten of the University of Washington for a paper entitled "Penalized Classification using Fisher’s Linear Discriminant". Travel Awards were given to Genevera Allen of Rice University (“A Generalized Least Squares Matrix Decomposition”), Qunhua Li of University of California at Berkeley (“Measuring Reproducibility of High-Throughput Experiments”), Jessica Minnier of Harvard University (“Risk Classification with an Adaptive Naï Bayes Kernel Machine Model”), Layla Parast of  Harvard University (“Landmark Prediction of Long Term Survival Incorporating Short Term Event Time Information”), and Sihai Dave Zhao of Harvard University (“Grouped Variable Selection via Hierarchical Models”).

Barry announced that going forward, the submission date for the Byar Award will be moved up to January 1, with plans for the committee to announce finalists within three weeks, making it easier for program planning and for non-winners to submit their work through the regular JSM submission process.

4.      Treasurer’s report (Belin for Ghosh)  Past treasurer Tom Belin reported for Debashis Ghosh, who was unable to attend, that section finances are stable.  The section balance at the beginning of 2011 was $42,268.20, and the current balance is $37,756.12.

5.      Report from Council on Sections (Roe, Banerjee, Moore)  It was reported that an interest group on Statistics and Imaging was trying to become a section, with mixed feedback from the executive committee reflecting concerns about the proliferation and overlap among sections.  There was discussion of the idea of ASA investing in more infrastructure for poster presentations, but the executive committee thought it would be more cost-effective simply to call on presenters to have their own sufficiently charged laptops if they want to provide computer demonstrations.

6.      Strategic initiatives (Stone): There was a brief presentation by Nate Holt and Kenny Lopiano from University of Florida on their project of spending a day in a high school to introduce statistics and biostatistics to students.  The students were very interested.  This approach was applied more broadly in other schools.  There was encouragement for people to spread the word on the availability of strategic-initiative support from the section.