Secretary's Report on Executive Committee meetings (Jan-Aug 2021)
TSHS Secretary’s Report, Fall 2021
The following is a summary of the TSHS Executive Committee meetings from January to August of 2021. All meetings were held on Zoom. The August meeting took place on Zoom during JSM 2021.
The following topics were discussed at the January 15th meeting:
Two new members joined the committee:
Jesse Troy (Duke University) joined the Executive Committee as Secretary
Doug Landsittel (originally at University of Pittsburgh and now at Indiana University)
The committee agreed to invite Tom Braun at the University of Michigan to take the position of Webinar Coordinator.
The Section Chair, Ann Brearley, made a motion to form a nominating committee for ASA Fellows. The motion was seconded and passed. Discussion regarding the proposed committee membership is summarized below:
Chair. The standing member serving the second year of the 2-year term
Membership. Two standing members and up to two annual members. Amy indicated that if any committee member is the official nominator, they cannot be letter writers.
Term of membership. The standing member and chair will serve 2-year terms. Initial terms for new members may be set by the Chair of the Section for one, two, or three years so that one of two members shall be appointed each year. The annual members will serve 1-year terms and be selected to support the year’s nominations.
Responsibilities. The Fellows Nominating Committee solicits nominations from the section membership in late spring. Up to two TSHS members are selected for ASA Fellow nomination. The standing members recruit annual members, two per nomination, to assist with the nomination packet development. The committee should solicit letters of support in early fall and assist the nominee with preparing the needed statements. The chair oversees the packet preparation and timeline to ensure submission (usually no later than March 1). If the title of Fellow is awarded to the nominee(s), the Committee Chair, or a delegate, will introduce the new Fellow(s) at the JSM TSHS Business Meeting and will prepare a statement about their accomplishments for a post in the TSHS blog.
The committee discussed combining the Promoting Promotions and Mentoring Committees into a single Career Development Committee and there was general agreement that this would be a good approach.
The following topics were discussed at the February 19th meeting:
Tom Braun from University of Michigan joined the committee and will help with setting up Webinars, to be offered three or four times per year.
The Executive Committee President, Ann Brearley, reported that the revised TSHS charter has been sent to Rick Peterson at ASA and will be on the ballot for Spring 2021.
The following topics were discussed at the March 19th meeting:
Ann Brearley proposed that the committee offer Ada Youk from the University of Pittsburgh the position of Chair of the Career Development Committee. The committee agreed with this proposal.
Ann Brearley announced that she would call a meeting of the Awards Committee to discuss who would receive the Council of Sections Service Award. This will be the first year the award is given to a TSHS committee member. Executive Committee members can make nominations and the awardee is selected by the TSHS Awards Committee.
The following topics were discussed at the April 16th meeting:
The TSHS program for JSM 2021 was discussed. The program includes 1 invited session, 7 topic contributed sessions, and 2 roundtable discussions.
Ada Youk joined the committee as Chair of the Career Development Committee. Ada is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Ada is also Director of the Master of Science degree in Biostatistics and will begin serving as Vice Chair for Education in the Summer of 2021. Ada has been at Pitt since the late 1990s where she started her career in occupational epidemiology, followed by work at the Veterans Administration, and is now focusing on education.
There was some discussion about the TSHS Section Handbook, which is undergoing revisions to match the recently revised TSHS Section Charter.
The following topics were discussed at the May 21st meeting:
Ada Youk, Chair of the Career Development Committee, announced that she has gathered some sample letters for promotion with the help of former TSHS Section Chair Felicity Enders. Ada also proposed setting up a CV review session for junior faculty or people searching for academic positions.
The following topics were discussed at the June 18th meeting:
The following awards were announced:
Council of Sections (COS) Service Award - Amy Nowacki, PhD, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic.
Young Investigator Award - Mine Dogucu, PhD, Department of Statistics, University of California Irvine. Paper: Mine Dogucu & Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel (2021), "Web Scraping in the Statistics and Data Science Curriculum: Challenges and Opportunities", Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 29:sup1, S112-S122, DOI: 10.1080/10691898.2020.1787116.
Outstanding Teaching Award - Mary Sammel, ScD, Department of Biostatistics and Informatics Center for Innovative Design and Analysis, Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical.
TSHS Distinguished Achievement Award - Felicity Enders, PhD, Mayo Clinic.
There was a motion to bestow the Distinguished Achievement Award annually rather than every other year as it is currently done. Motion was seconded and approved.
The following topics were discussed at the July 16th meeting:
TSHS webinars are now available on YouTube and can be found by searching Google for “TSHS Webinars.” Webinars are only posted online with the presenter’s permission.
Four new submissions are under consideration for the TSHS Resources Portal, which continues to expand. The Portal is an excellent source for high-quality resources for teachings statistics in the health sciences.
The following topics were discussed at the August 9th meeting:
The August 9th meeting was held virtually at JSM 2021. A total of 31 people attended the meeting.
The TSHS President, Ann Brearley, opened the meeting by presenting an overview of the TSHS section, including the section’s mission and major accomplishments from 2020-2021.
Ann invited section members to contact her if they are interested in any of the following open positions for 2022:
Section Chair-Elect
Program Chair-Elect
TSHS Resource Editor.
Ann also invited section members who are interested in participating in the Webinars and Career Development committees to contact either Tom Braun or Ada Youk, respectively.
Awards were presented (see the summary of the June 18th meeting above)
Two rounds of socializing were held during the mixer, utilizing the “breakout room” feature in Zoom. The breakout room themes were:
Webinars (host: Tom Braun)
Career development (host: Ada Youk)
Resources Portal (host: Carol Bigelow)
Blog and Resource Reviews (hosts: John Doucette, Travis Loux)
Program chair/chair-elect (hosts: Jaya Satagopan, Brandon George)
General socializing
Main room: General section discussion (host: Ann Brearley)