Four BIOS students win ENAR’s Distinguished Student Paper Award

February 16, 2015

Four biostatistics students at the Gillings School of Global Public Health were among only 20 selected for the Distinguished Student Paper Award, presented by the Eastern North America Region (ENAR) of the International Biometric Society.

Winners of ENAR’s Distinguished Student Paper Award posed recently with their advisers. On the front row, left to right, are Tom Stewart, Eunjee Lee and Lu Mao. (Not pictured is Dr. Guanhua Chen.) On the back row are Drs. Joseph Ibrahim, Hongtu Zhu and Danyu Lin, biostatistics professors.

Guanhua Chen, PhD (now assistant professor of biostatistics at Vanderbilt University), Eunjee Lee (also in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ statistics department), Lu Mao and Thomas Stewart will be recognized at the annual ENAR spring meeting, to be held March 15-18, in Miami, Fla. Part of the prize is a travel award to support attendance at the conference.

The winners are selected based on the strength of their manuscripts in four areas – motivation by a relevant problem, methodological development or investigation relevant to the problem, scientifically meaningful illustration of the proposed methodology, and clarity and style of presentation.

“I am so happy to see the great involvement of our students in ENAR,” said Jianwen Cai, PhD, professor and vice chair of biostatistics at the Gillings School, “and I am very pleased about our students’ success in winning this prestigious award.”

Cai said she was particularly gratified by the students’ work, given her leadership role in ENAR. This year, she is president-elect, and she will serve in a leadership capacity for two subsequent years. [Read more about Cai.]

“We continue to be national leaders in the number of students winning the prestigious ENAR paper awards,” said Michael Kosorok, PhD, professor and chair of biostatistics. “We are quite proud of our students’ success.”

The 2015 ENAR meeting will bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government, connected through a common interest in biometry.