JSM 2024 Section Awards: Biographies

Section Awards, by Jaya M. Satagopan, PhD, Rutgers School of Public Health.

During 2024, TSHS presented three awards to our Section members – the Young Investigator Award, the Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Distinguished Achievement Award.

YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD

Dr. Alice Paul was the 2024 recipient of the Young Investigator Award. This award recognizes a young investigator for their promise as a statistics educator or in conducting statistics education research in the health sciences. Dr. Paul excels in all these areas. At the time of the award, Dr. Paul was an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Brown University’s School of Public Health, where she is currently Associate Professor of Biostatistics. Dr. Paul is the author of the book Mastering Health Data Science Using R. This is a free online book published in 2024, and is an interactive resource for teaching health data science using R. This book, which has quickly become a valuable teaching resource is an application-driven teaching guide. It includes examples, including real-world data examples such as the NHANES study, sample R codes, trouble shooting advice, and exercises to teach foundational statistical concepts to students in the health sciences.

OUTSTANDING TEACHING AWARD

Dr. Hillary Watt, Senior Statistics Teaching Fellow, Imperial College, London, was the 2024 recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Award. This award recognizes an outstanding statistics educator and mentor in health sciences. Dr. Watt is passionate about teaching statistics to the faculty of medicine at Imperial College, London. She has exceptional capacity to observe challenges faced by health science students with foundational statistical concepts and pro-actively identifies teaching strategies to mitigate these issues. She uses image-based explanations and clear communications to clarify key topics such as confidence intervals, p-values, regression coefficients, inference population, random sampling, and transformations, amongst others. Dr. Watt has published her teaching strategies in the International Journal of Epidemiology. She is also co-author of the free online book Data Wrangling Recipes in R, that helps students prepare data for analysis using R. Through these scholarly works, Dr. Watt has motivated numerous senior colleagues to use her teaching approach of effective visuals and plain language.

DISTINGUISHED ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Dr. Jeff Szychowski, Professor and Chair of Biostatistics, University of Alabama at Birmingham, was the 2024 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award. This award recognizes a Section member who has provided outstanding long-term service to the Section. Dr. Szychowski has served the section as Program Chair (program chair-elect: 2014; program chair: 2015; past program chair: 2016) and Section Chair (chair-elect: 2017; chair: 2018; past-chair: 2019). In these positions, Dr. Szychowski demonstrated exemplary leadership, organizing an impressive TSHS program at JSM 2015 as Program Chair and steering the section to new heights between 2017 and 2019 as Section Chair. He created networking opportunities, secured door prizes, and solidified section sponsorships from STATA and R to support the section business meetings. He also revitalized the section’s webinar series by increasing its frequency to three webinars per year, thus significantly enhancing access to valuable educational resources for all section members. Many of these initiatives continue to this day and support the section intellectually and financially. Through his tireless efforts, Dr. Szychowski has furthered the TSHS mission of promoting excellence in statistical education.