Garcia wins the 2024 Gertrude M. Cox Award
April 4, 2024
Tanya Garcia, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public health has been honored with the 2024 Gertrude M. Cox Award, which is awarded by Washington Statistic Society (WSS) and RTI International.
Dr. Tanya Garcia
For over a decade, Garcia has led a transdisciplinary research team of statisticians and neuroscientists toward designing robust statistical methods for neurodegenerative diseases.
Since the start of her tenure-track career, she has maintained continuous funding as Principal Investigator of multiple competitive grants, including from the Huntington’s Disease Society of America and National Institutes of Health and most recently an R01 from the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Garcia is also a Provost Distinguished Faculty Leader and Tyson Academic Leader at UNC Chapel Hill.
The award was established in 2003 through a joint agreement between WSS and RTI International. The award annually recognizes a statistician in early to mid-career who has made significant contributions to one or more of the areas of applied statistics in which Gertrude Cox worked.
Cox helped start multiple centers for statistical training and research, including the UNC Gillings Department of Biostatistics and Research Triangle Institute. The scholarship will be presented at the Women’s Caucus of the association’s Joint Statistical Meeting in June 2024.
The Cox award includes a $1,000 honorarium, travel expenses to attend the WSS annual dinner and a commemorative plaque.
As this year’s recipient, Garcia will present at the Annual Cox Award Presentation and Dinner on May 29, 2024, in Washington D.C. on flexible statistical modeling of the disease progression of Huntington disease.
She previously won the Gertrude M. Cox Scholarship for doctoral students from the American Statistical Association. The Gertrude M. Cox Scholarship was established in 1989 to increase the representation of women in statistical fields, and it is conferred to women pursuing advanced degrees in statistics.
Garcia states, “I have always wanted to be honored with the privilege of winning the Gertrude M. Cox award since the start of my tenure-track career, and I feel incredibly grateful to join a group of remarkable women who have won this award.”
“Congratulations to Dr. Garcia for receiving the 2024 Gertrude M. Cox Award in recognition of her significant contributions to methodological and applied biostatistics,” says Michael Hudgens, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biostatistics. “Dr. Garcia has an impressive record of research, teaching, mentoring and service that exemplifies the intent and spirit of the Gertrude Cox Award.”
Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.
