2011 David P. Byar Young Investigator Award Winners

The David P. Byar Young Investigator Award is given annually to a new researcher in the Biometrics Section who presents an original manuscript at the Joint Statistical Meetings. The award commemorates David Byar, a renowned biostatistician who made significant contributions to the development and application of statistical methods during his career at the National Cancer Institute.

This year, there were 26 papers submitted to the Byar Award Committee, which consisted of Barry Graubard, Committee Chair (National Cancer Institute), Jack Lee (MD Anderson), Dianne Finkelstein (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University), Kathy Cronin (National Cancer Institute), Joanna Shih (National Cancer Institute, Peter Kraft (Harvard University). The committee chose five travel award winners in addition to the Byar award winner.  Winners are given below along with their picture with Barry Grubard, Awards Committee chair.

Daniela Witten, University of Washington, is this year's winner of the David P Byar Young Investigator Award and received a $1500 cash award for the paper "Penalized Classification using Fisher's Linear Discriminant" which was presented at this JSM.

Travel award winners:

Genevera Allen, Rice University, for the paper titled, "A Generalized Least Squares Matrix Decomposition"

Qunhua Li, University of California at Berkeley, for the paper titled, "Measuring Reproducibility of High-Throughput Experiments"

Jessica Minnier, Harvard University, for the paper titled, "Risk Classification with an Adaptive Naï Bayes Kernel Machine Model"

Layla Parast, Harvard University, for the paper titled, "Landmark Prediction of Long Term Survival Incorporating Short Term Event Time Information"

Sihai Dave Zhao, Harvard University, for the paper titled, "Grouped Variable Selection via Hierarchical Models"

Congratulations to the award winners on their notable accomplishments!