Year-end review by Prof. Bhramar Mukherjee (Department Chair)

1. Glimpses from 2018

2. Here is to All of Us….

3. The graduates of tomorrow!
Class of 2018

4. A very active faculty…
Faculty Retreat in Grand Haven, 2018

5. Michigan’s undergraduate summer program students
164 Students trained
15 Students in our program
50 Alums in graduate school
44 attended this past summer

6. Growing body of outstandingpost-doctoral fellows
Ice Cream Social, 2018

7. Lori Athey Sarah Cissell
Nicole Fenech
Sabrina Olsson
Daniel Barker Denise Bianchi
Wendy Mashburn Holly McCamant
Irene Felicetti
Fatma Nadjari
Tara Smith Kerry Sprague
Our Amazing
Central Administrative Staff

8. Some Events, Awards, Initiatives

9. Professor Michael Boehnke awarded the
Precision Medicine World Congress Pioneer Award
Professor Michael Boehnke was awarded with
the Precision Medicine World Congress
Pioneer award at the Ross School of
Business. The PMWC Pioneer Award is given
to rare individuals who presaged the advent
of personalized medicine when less evolved
technology and encouragement from peers
existed, but still made major advances in the
field. PMWC 2018 recognized Professor
Boehnke for pioneering large-scale studies
identifying genetic risk in diabetes and Bipolar
Disorder. Congratulations to Professor
Boehnke who has been an exemplary leader
and mentor in the Department of Biostatistics
and beyond!

10. ProfessorPeter Song elected 2018 ASA Fellow
Professor Peter Song has been elected a
fellow of the American Statistical
Association. His citation is as follows: "For
outstanding scholarly contributions to the
theory, methods, and applications in the
areas of dependent data, estimating
functions, and computational statistics; for
significant contributions to collaborative
research in medicine and public health; for
excellence in teaching and mentoring; and
for dedicated service to the profession".
Professor Song will be inducted as a new
fellow on Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at the
Vancouver Convention Center during the
Joint Statistical Meetings awards
ceremony.

11. ProfessorRoderick Little gave the President's Invited Address at ENAR 2018
Professor Roderick Little gave the
President's Invited Address at ENAR,
entitled "On Statistics, Study Design and
Data Science: the Prediction and Modeling
Cultures.” It was fairly dramatic!

12. Biostatistics And Beyond
Professor Mousumi Banerjee talks to the
students of Pioneer High School Orchestra
about Rabindranath Tagore who wrote the
lyrics and music for more than 2,200 Bengali
songs. “With the involvement of the diverse
student body of Pioneer High School, we are
already on our way to bringing Tagore to the
world,” Banerjee said. She was also awarded
the Research Collegiate Professorship this
year. She named it after Dr K: Professor Anant
M Kshirsagar.

13. University Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award
Professor Bhramar Mukherjee received a
Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from
The Office of the Provost for her scholarship,
mentoring, teaching and service.

14. Evan Reynolds has been chosen as one of two Student Leaders of the Year for the University
Evan Reynolds, a Ph.D. student in the
Department of Biostatistics, in his role at
Statcom President, has been chosen as
one of two Student Leaders of the Year for
the University. STATCOM is a student-led
organization that provides pro-bono
statistical consulting for governmental and
non-profit organizations. Its clients
generally do not have the funds to hire a
professional consultant, but have
information to collect or data to analyze
that would help them in making more
informed decisions about their operations.

15. STATCOM wins the Student Leadership Professional Organization of the Year Award
STATCOM has won the University of Michigan Student Leadership Professional Organization of
the Year award. STATCOM is a student-led organization that provides pro-bono statistical
consulting for governmental and non-profit organizations, and is led from the Department of
Biostatistics and the Michigan Institute for Data Science. In the 12 years since its founding,
Statcom has engaged in over 40 projects for non-profits, and now involves more than 100
students in multiple departments and schools with up to one dozen active projects at any point
in time. STATCOM's work has ranged from local health departments, to city governments, to
programs for food security and the elderly, and recently has begun to partnered with the
Community Technical Assistance Collaborative at the Ginsberg Center to assist public policy
students with data analysis. In addition to providing community service, STATCOM provides an
excellent opportunity for biostatistics students to practice consulting and data analysis in a real
world setting. Statcom recently presented their work at Bloomberg Data 4 Common Good
Exchange at NYC. Special thanks to STATCOM co-presidents Evan Reynolds (biostatistics) and
Tim NeCamp (statistics), as well as the rest of the student leadership team ( Ina Conrado, Emily
Morris, Stephen Salerno, and Sharanya Chandran), and the faculty co-advisors Tom Braun,
Michael Elliott and Cathie Spino.

16. Boxian Wei receives a Thomas Chalmers Student Scholarship Winner Award
Boxian Wei, a Ph.D. student in the
Department of Biostatistics has been
chosen as the Thomas C. Chalmers
Student Scholarship Winner from among
the three finalists and a $500 USD prize
for the best paper and presentation of "A
Bayesian Data Analysis in a Small n
Sequential Multiple Assignment
Randomized Trial (snSMART)" at the
39th Annual Meeting of the Society for
Clinical Trials, May 20-23, in Portland,
OR. The Thomas C. Chalmers Student
Scholarship is in honor of Tom Chalmers,
an American physician who played a
pivotal role in the development of
modern randomized clinical trials and
was a founder of the Society for Clinical
Trials.

17. Emily Morris won the 2018 ENAR Poster Award
Emily Morris, a Ph.D. student in the
department of Biostatistics, won the 2018
ENAR Poster Award for her work on
"SurvBoost: An R package for high-
dimensional variable selection in the
stratified proportional hazards model via
gradient boosting".

18. Yilun Sun received ENAR Distinguished Paper Award
Yilun Sun, a Ph.D. student in the
Department of Biostatistics received an
ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Award
for the 2018 ENAR Spring Meeting in
Atlanta, GA. This award recognizes his
excellent paper entitled "Multiply Robust
Estimation in Nonparametric Regression
with Missing Data", which is based on the
first chapter of Yilun's doctoral dissertation.

19. Emily Hector won the John Van Ryzin Award for best student paper at ENAR
Emily Hector won the John Van Ryzin Award
for best paper submitted to the ENAR 2018
Distinguished Student Paper Award
Competition. The paper is on "A Distributed
and Integrated Method of Moments for
High-dimensional Correlated Data
Analysis", and was co-authored by her
advisor Professor Peter X.-K. Song.

20. Tian Gu won the second place in the Michigan Datathon
Tian Gu, a Ph.D. student at the Department
of Biostatistics and her 3 teammates from
UM Engineering and U of Chicago Statistics
won the second place in the Michigan
Datathon, hosted by Citadel LLC & Citadel
Securities in partnership with Correlation
One and the UM Department of Statistics
on November 4th, 2017. After the 7-hour-
long data analyzing competition, their
report Importance Factors for Airbnb
Customer Review won out of 100 teams.

21. U-M launches new Precision Health research initiative
Researchers across campus--
including the School of Public
Health, the Medical School, and the
College of Engineering--will combine
biomedical expertise with big data
and social science approaches to
tailor health solutions for the
population. The Michigan Genomics
Initiative and the Genes for Good are
at the heart of this initiative. Both
launched by the Felix E Moore
Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics,
Professor Goncalo Abecasis.
Professor Michael Boehnke was
appointed as a new co-director in
2018.

22. New Promotions and Hires
Congratulations!

23. Our newest hire:
Dean F DuBois Bowman, Professor of Biostatistics
12th Dean of the UM School of Public Health

24. New Hire and Promotion Party at the Kalbfleisch Garden

25. Guests at the Banquet for Fifth Bayesian, Fiducial, and Frequentist Conference May 2018

26. Rod Little Distinguished
Lectureship; 2018
Awardee Scott Zeger

27. Fun Moments to Reflect and Remember

28. Camp Storer Retreat 2018 Group Photo

29. Icebreaker games at the Student Retreat

30. Colleagues enjoying
some sun at the Faculty
Retreat in Grand Haven

31. Shout out to the
Biostatistics Student
Association (BSA).
Special thanks to the
BSA leadership
team, Ina Conrado,
Ryan Ross, and
Mandy Wong!

32. Costume contest winners, Lady Bristol and Sir Ronald Fisher!
How does the tea taste?

33. Abhay, Katie, Lori, Deesha, Peter, Jiahui, and Bhramar
celebrating the winners of the pie contest.

34. Such a tasty contest. Congratulations Deesha!

36. Richard G Cornell Fellowship: Elizabeth Chase
Outstanding First-Year Masters Students: Fatema Shafie*
Khorasani, Lap Sum Chan, Jitao Wang, Yaanwen Zhai
Best Performance on the Qualifying Exam: Theresa Devasia

37. Outstanding Graduate Student Instructors!
Cui Guo, Mengbing Li, Pedro Orozco del Pino, Ming Tang.

38. Our outstanding staff were recognized the holiday party! Each
of them play an important role in making things happen!

39. Peter Song and
Mike Elliott are
all smiles after
receiving a fun
holiday gift from
the chair.

40. Professor Rod Little
in his elements. The
holiday party would
not have been
complete without
the carolers from
the Ann Arbor
Consort!

42. Wish you all a restful, soulful, peaceful winter recess
and an inspiring 2019! Thank you for all you do!

43. TO BE
CONTINUED
IN 2019…