TSHS Section Awards
This year TSHS awarded three awards to our section members.
The Young Investigator Award is an annual award which recognizes a promising young investigator for their promise as a statistics educator or in conducting statistics education research in the health sciences. This year the Young Investigator Award was awarded to Dr. Amanda Ellis, an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky’s Department of Biostatistics. Dr. Ellis’ research interests focus on graduate education and curriculum development with a primary focus on modernizing and ensuring excellence in training programs in the area of graduate education. Dr. Ellis’ nominator highlighted her accomplishments despite being early in her career: “Although Dr. Ellis is a recent addition to our faculty, she has already made a significant impact in our department. She has helped re-design the core biostatistics course in the MPH (CPH603) and worked with faculty to develop the new MS in Biostatistics. The published paper included as part of this nomination reflects her exceptional efforts in transforming the Department’s approach to teaching MPH students. Her course has become the College standard (and award-winning) for how to embrace Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) competencies to promote student success. Amanda has already established herself as a leader in the Department and College for teaching innovation. Her significant teaching experience and commitment to innovative teaching methods uniquely position her to impact our training programs, new initiatives for workforce development, and statistics education research.“
The Outstanding Teacher Award is an annual award which recognizes an outstanding statistics educator and mentor in the health sciences. This year’s winner was Dr. Tom Braun, a professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan (UM). Dr. Braun has had over 20 years of teaching experience at the UUM Department of Biostatistics. During this time he has taught and developed ten courses for the department, for Master and Ph.D. biostatistics students, graduate students in the UM School of Public Health (UMSPH), and medical professionals as part of the On Job/On Campus program, as well as nationally through the Methods in Clinical Cancer Research Workshop. Dr. Braun’s nominator highlighted his innovation in curriculum design: “As noted on his CV, Tom has been the instructor for ten different courses in our department, five of which he was responsible for designing for the first time, or completely revising the course curriculum. Most recently, he developed an entire new set of curricula for Biostatistics 501, which is an introductory course required for Master of Public Health students. Tom adopted a hybrid design, in which students watched recorded lectures away from class and in-class time was dedicated to working on projects, including data analysis and review of published public health manuscripts. Tom’s work led to his giving a webinar for TSHS in January 2020 discussing his experiences with the implementation of design with two cohorts of students.”
The Distinguished Achievement award recognizes a Section member who has provided outstanding long-term service to the Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences (TSHS) Section and the American Statistical Association (ASA). This year’s winner was Dr. Scott Evans. Dr. Evans is currently the Director of the Biostatistics Center and the Founding Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at The George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. As a member of the ASA and the TSHS Section, Dr. Evans has provided exceptional, longstanding service to the Section and the ASA. Among several honors and awards bestowed upon Dr. Evans are a Certificate of Appreciation from the ASA for Retiring as Editor (2019), recognition for the Best Contributed Paper (Joint Statistical Meetings, ASA, 2014), and induction as a Fellow of the ASA (2012). Dr. Evans exhibits leadership and successful collaboration efforts in having held several office positions, committee memberships, and service activities within the ASA and the TSHS Section, a few of which were as a member of the Board of Directors (ASA, 2018-2020), a Fellows Committee member (2014) and Chair (2008) for the TSHS Section, Chair for the section on Medical Devices and Diagnostics (2021) and the Executive Committee for the section on Statistics in Sports (2007), and President of the Boston Chapter of This is Statistics (2003-2006). Additionally, from 2014-2019, Dr. Evans was the Editor-in-Chief of Chance, and he is currently an Advisory Editor.
Congratulations to our award winners!