List of Recent Events

Oct 30, 2023: The Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award Reception was hosted by the Boston Chapter to celebrate the 2023 recipient, Dr. Nicholas Horton, the Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society, Statistics, and Data Science at Amherst College.

The event included introductions of the chapter by Wenting Cheng, the current Chapter President. Joseph Blitzstein, a professor at Harvard University and a past Chapter President, shared stories about Dr. Frederick Mosteller. Tom Lane, past Chapter President discussed contributions by Dr. Nicholas Horton. Amy Wagaman kindly provided a tribute video describing Dr. Horton's impact at Amherst, and containing messages of appreciation from his current and past students. The event saw close to 50 attendees. Dr. Horton's presentation was titled "From the Federalist papers to ChatGPT," which explored the relevance of text analytics in statistics education and data science.

Oct 19, 2023: Mark Glickman presented a very well-attended talk on Thursday, October 19, at the Harvard Science Center. His topic was "Data Tripper: Distinguishing Authorship of Beatles Songs via Data Science." Glickman covered a wide variety of technical issues that came up in this analysis: feature generation from musical notes, logistic regression, elastic net regularization, novel cross-validation methods, and computational and model assessment issues. This event was hosted by the Boston Chapter, in collaboration with the Harvard University student chapter (GUSH).

Oct 13, 2023: The 2023 Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium, organized by the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association (BCASA) and hosted by Sanofi, was a resounding success. The event marked a significant milestone in the history of the symposium, with a record-breaking attendance of 157, a Scientific Committee with representation from both industry and academia, and a wide variety of presentations in different sessions, since its inception in 2017. The attendees came from the New England area and other regions with diverse backgrounds, representing various sectors of the pharmaceutical industry, clinical research organization, academia, and university students.

The 2023 Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium was a landmark event that showcased the collective efforts of many dedicated colleagues and organizations. We look forward to continuing this tradition of excellence in the years to come.

Sep 30, 2023: The Boston Chapter proudly hosted the 2023 ASA Traveling Course: "From R Markdown to Quarto". Generously sponsored by the ASA, the course featured expert instruction from esteemed educators Andrew Bray of UC Berkeley and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel from Duke University and RStudio. Mingfei Li, the chapter's Membership Committee Chair moderated this traveling course. Attendees had the privilege of delving into the intricacies of Quarto, the cutting-edge platform poised to revolutionize R Markdown.

Sep 22, 2023: The virtual Coffee Chat event "Unlocking the Future of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Coffee Chat with Industry Experts" was hosted by the Boston Chapter of ASA on September 22, 2023, in collaboration with the Boston University Student Chapter of ASA, and moderated by Russell Goebel, a Ph.D. student at Boston University. This year's event panelists included Wenting Cheng (BCASA President; Biogen), Jianchang Lin (BCASA Council of Chapters Representative; Takeda), Qing Li (BCASA Planning Committee Member; MorphoSys US Inc.), and Kush Kapur (BCASA Secretary; Argenx).

May 5, 2023: Members of the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association and from the New England Statistical Society joined the Harvard Department of Statistics and celebrated Herman Chernoff's Centennial Celebration at Harvard University.
April 19, 2023: Ronald L. Wasserstein, Executive Director of the American Statistical Association (ASA), and Amanda Malloy, Director of Development of the ASA met with several officers of the Boston Chapter and planning committee members at Harvest Restaurant in Cambridge, MA over dinner. Members of the BCASA who attended the meeting were: Wenting Cheng (Chapter President, Biogen), Olga Vitek (Chapter Past President, Northeastern University), Kristin Baltrusaitis (Chapter Past Program Chair, Harvard University), Jianchang Lin (Council of Chapters Representative, Takeda), Tom Lane (Chapter Publicity and Communication Officer, MathWorks), and Kush Kapur (Chapter Secretary, Argenx). In addition, Dr. Mark Glickman (Harvard University) joined the group. The dinner was a chance for Ron to express his gratitude for officers of the Boston Chapter and planning committee members for their services and support of the ASA and the Chapter. Ron asked about Boston Chapter’s recent updates and discussed ways he and other ASA officers could further support the Chapter. The discussion was lively. Ron and the committee members discussed organizing a student symposium and other events that would benefit the ASA and the local statistical community. Ron enjoyed the dinner and expressed a desire to continue discussions to find further collaborations with the Boston Chapter.

Jan 23, 2023: The Boston Chapter of the ASA hosted the annual winter party on Zoom. The event was well attended by members of the Chapter, and discussed the implications of ChaptGPT in higher education with a focus on statistics. More descriptions of the event can be found in the Chapter's March newsletter here.

Jan 18, 2023: The Boston Chapter of the ASA hosted a webinar with Professor Ying Yuan from MD Anderson Cancer Center. In this webinar, Dr. Yuan will gave a review of the BOIN designs. The webinar was moderated by Dr. Zhaoyang Teng, Biostatistics Director, Head of LCM (GMPA, HEOR and Market Access) Biostatistics for Oncology, Head of Biostatistics in APAC at Servier Pharmaceuticals.

Dec 7, 2022: The Boston Chapter of the ASA presented a conversation with Victor De Gruttola, moderated by Andrea Foulkes. Dr. Andrea Foulkes, Director of Biostatistics at Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The recording of the event is available on the Chapter's YouTube channel here.

Nov 17, 2022: The Boston Chapter of the ASA hosted the 2022 Statistical Outreach and Literacy Award Presentation. Prof. Elena Naumova of Tufts University is the recipient of this year's award and presented the talk The Art of Storytelling with Scientific Data. The event took place at the Tuft's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. To learn more about Prof. Naumova's work, please see here.

Oct 15, 2022: The ASA Traveling Course: "Navigating Tough Conversations in Statistical Collaboration" took place in October. The instructors were Emily Griffith, Julia Sharp, and Zach Weller.

Oct 7, 2022: The 2022 Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium took place in October. For a detailed description of the event, speaker bios and presentation slides, please visit here.

Sep 22, 2022: The BCASA sponsored event A Conversation with Dr. Nan Laird took place on Zoom. Dr. Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health, Emerita, in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The conversation was moderated by alumnus Joseph Hogan, ScD '95, the Carole and Lawrence Sirovich Professor of Public Health, Professor of Biostatistics and Chair of Biostatistics at Brown University. Recording of the event is available on the Chapter's YouTube channel.

May 22-25, 2022: The 35th New England Statistics Symposium took place at Storrs (UConn campus). This year's conference was hybrid. Details about the conference can be found here.

April 2, 2022: Boston Chapter of the ASA, Bentley University and Boston University Student Chapter of the ASA jointly organized the 2022 Virtual Student Research Symposium on Statistics and Data Science. This year's conference was online. Andrew Therriault, Data Science and Strategy Consultant, former Chief Data Officer of the City of Boston delivered the keynote talk. A recording of the talk is available on BCASA's Youtube channel.

March 24 & 25, 2022: International Statistical Institute (ISI) Online Course Building Technical Editing and Science Communication Skills for 21st Century was taught by Prof. Elena Naumova (Tufts University, USA) and Prof. Alessandro Fasso (University of Bergamo, Italy). Details about this course can be accessed here.

March 11, 2022: Women in Data Science and Statistics (WiDS) took place virtually. The Conference was organized by Harvard, MIT, and Microsoft Research New England in collaboration with Stanford University.

March 10, 2022: The 2022 Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award presentation was given by this year's recipient Professor Francesca Dominici, the co-Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, at Harvard University, and the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Interim Co-Editor in Chief of the Harvard Data Science Review. The title of her talk was How much evidence do you need? Data Science to Inform Environmental Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic. The recording of her talk is available on the BCASA YouTube channel here.

March 3-5, 2022: The Tufts Research and Data Symposium for Food and Nutrition spanned over three days of the first week of March. The Symposium was organized by the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

January 25, 2022: Professor Robert Goldman gave his award presentation Reflections on 50 Years of Teaching Statistics. Congratulations to Professor Goldman on receiving this year's BCASA Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award! His presentation can be viewed on the BCASA YouTube channel here.

January 13, 2022: This year's BCASA Annual Winter Social took place on Zoom.

October 29, 2021: Peng Sun, Senior Director Biostatistics, Biogen presented the last talk of the Fifth Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium. The title of the talk was "Novel Design and Implementation of Interim and Final Analyses in the Sham-Controlled Double Blind Randomized Phase III Studies in Spinal Muscular Atrophy". Details of the talk can be find the event page of the symposium. The recording of the talk is available on the Chapter's YouTube channel here.

October 22, 2021: The Fifth Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium presented the third talk of the symposium on "Historical Data Borrowing - Methods and Case Studies Review". Presenters of the talk were DIA NEED, Sammi Tang, Global head of Biometrics, Oncology, Servier, Rong Liu, Sr. Director of Biostatistics, BMS and Chenkun Wang, Associate Director of Biostatistics, Vertex. Details of the talk can be find the event page of the symposium. The recording of the talk is available on the Chapter's YouTube channel here.

October 9, 2021 and Oct 16, 2021: The BCASA sponsored the 2021 Traveling Short Course, a two-part series on "Introduction to Data Science, Machine Learning and Deep Learning in R and Python". The instructors were Dr. Ming Li, Senior Research Scientist at Amazon & Adjunct Instructor of University of Washington and Dr. Hui Lin, Lead Quantitative Researcher at Shopify.

September 17, 2021: Michael Hughes, Director, Center for Biostatistics in AIDS Research, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health gave a talk on "Design Considerations in COVID-19 Master Protocols -- ACTIV-2 Trial" on Zoom. This is the third talk of the Fifth Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium. Details of the talk can be find the event page of the symposium. The recording of the talk is available on the Chapter's YouTube channel here.

September 3, 2021: Rachel Liu, Associate Director, Takeda gave a talk on "Adaptive Designs for Optimal Dose Determination in I-O and Cell Therapy" on Zoom. This is the second talk of the Fifth Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium. Details of the talk can be find the event page of the symposium. The recording of the talk is available on the Chapter's YouTube channel here.

September 10, 2021: the short course on "Master Protocol on Drug Development: Methodology and Implementation" took place on Zoom. Dr. Satrajit Roychoudhury and Dr. Ling Wang (both with Pfizer) were instructors of the course.

July 23, 2021: the 1^st webinar of the five-part webinar series consisting of the Fifth Boston Pharmaceutical Symposium successfully took place on Zoom. The talk on “Use of Real World Data/Real World Evidence in Clinical Development” was given by Dr. Qing Li, Senior Manager, Takeda.

May 3 – May 14, 2021: The 2021 instance of the May Institute at Northeastern happened online! It was on Computation and Statistics for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics. The Instance. The instance included keynotes from young investigators, tutorials and hands-on by tool authors, and contributed talks by current and aspiring developers of computational methods. Participants took an in-depth look into case studies of design and analysis of mass spectrometry-based experiments

April 15, 2021: the webinar “Statistical Considerations for Non-Proportional Hazards: Methods and Applications” took place virtually. Dr. Bo Huang, Senior Director of Biostatistics and Head of Immuno-Oncology Statistics, Pfizer gave the talk during the webinar. The webinar was co-sponsored by the American Statistical Association (Boston, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, Princeton/Trenton, and Washington chapters), Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Biostatistics and Data Sciences Department), and New England Statistical Society (NESS).

April 1, 2021: April Webinar by Professor Andrew Gelman was given virtually based on his paper with Aki Vehtari regarding the most important statistical ideas in the past 50 years. Professor Gelman had lively discussions with attendees regarding the topics. The recording of the webinar is here.

March 26, 2021: The 6th Analytics Without Borders Conference was held virtually. This year's host was Bentley University, and the conference was organized in partnership with Bryant University, Tufts University and UMass at Lowell.

March 10, 2021: BCASA Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award Event took place virtually. This year's award winner Xinhong Lin, Professor of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Statistics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences gave a talk about her recent work on COVID-19. Link to Dr. Lin's talk is here.

Jan 19, 2021: BCASA Statistical Outreach and Literacy Award Presentation was given by the inaugural winner of the award Sharon Hessney. The Zoom event was recorded and the recording can be found here.

Jan 9, 2021: The Chapter’s annual evening event Winter Party took place on Zoom this year. The virtual party was a success where participants engaged in lively conversations and got to know each other. Technology brought us together even though we were not able to meet in person.

November & December, 2020: 2020 New England Rare Disease Statistics (NERDS) Webinar Series provided a four-part series. Organizers of the series were the New England Statistical Society (NESS) and the 2020 NERDS Organizing Committee. Sponsors of the series included Agios, Biogen, ASA Boston Chapter, ASA Connecticut Chapter, DahShu, The Lotus Group, Pfizer, Prometrika, Sage Therapeut, Servier, Takeda, Vertex. Details about the 2020 series can be found here https://nerds.nestat.org./index.html.

November 7, 2020: Student Research Symposium in Statistics and Data Science. The Student Research Symposium was held virtually. The Boston Chapter of the ASA, in collaboration with the ASA Student Chapters at Boston University, Bentley, and Tufts University organized the event.

October 16th and 23^rd: Short Course on the R package on Shiny. Short course introduced students to building web applications and dashboards with Shiny, reactive programming, and customizing and deploying apps for others to use. Instructor was Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh.

September 23, 2020: BCASA Discussion Panel. COVID19 pandemic: how does it influence the job market and career paths in data science, business analytics and data analytics?

April 27 – May 8, 2020: May Institute on Computation and Statistics for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics. The May Institute focuses on computational and statistical aspects of quantitative mass spectrometrybased proteomics. The course combines keynote presentations, introductory lectures, practical training, and informal personal discussions. The location was Northeastern University, Boston, MA. Organizers were Meena Choi and Olga Vitek. The website is https://computationalproteomics.khoury.northeastern.edu/

February 10, 2020: Mosteller Statistician of the Year Awards Dinner held at Boston University. The honoree and speaker was Professor Eric Kolaczyk, Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University. The title of the presentation was “On Moving 'Practice' to the Center of Statistics”.The presentation generated great interest and was well received by the large audience.

January 25, 2020: BCASA Winter Potluck Dinner and Party. This year's BCASA Winter Potluck Dinner and Party was held in Carlisle on Saturday, January 25. This was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and to meet many new ones. The food was delicious and everyone enjoyed the evening. Thanks to all who attended. And many thanks to Tom and Judy Lane for hosting this event.

December 4, 2019: Just Machine Learning at Bentley University. Dr. Tina Eliassi-Rad gave a presentation discussing current tasks, experiences, and performance measures as they pertain to fairness in machine learning.

November 16, 2019: Short Course on "Guidelines for Using State-of-the-Art Methods to Estimate Propensity Score and Inverse Probability of Treatment Weights When Drawing Causal Inferences" at Northeastern University. This short course provided an introduction to causal modeling using the potential outcomes framework and the use of propensity scores and weighting (i.e., propensity score or inverse probability of treatment weights) to estimate causal effects from observational data.

November 15, 2019: Statistics and the Life Sciences: Creating a Healthier World at Boston University School of Public Health in Boston, MA. The goal of this workshop was to stage the statistical challenges and progress towards solutions in a handful of emerging and mission-critical areas of the health sciences with global impact. Specifically, focus on the following three areas: digital health, machine learning in causal inference, and networks for public health.

October 11, 2019: 2019 New England Rare Disease Statistics (NERDS) Workshop at Seaport Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. This workshop provided statisticians across the entire rare disease drug development spectrum a forum to exchange ideas and share experiences, and also to network.

October 7, 2019: Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award Lecture at Harvard Statistics Department. Dr. Ben Baumer, Assistant Professor in the Statistical & Data Sciences Program at Smith College, discussed how statistics and data science curriculum can change in the coming decade to meet challenges brought by greater emphasis on existing competencies, new paradigms, and modern manifestations of old concepts.

August 22, 2019: MinneBOS 2019 at Boston University Questrom School of Business, Boston, MA. MinneAnalytics returned to the East Coast for the second edition of the Field Guide to Data Science and Emerging Tech in the Boston Community. Here is a link to one of the presentations.

May 6, 2019: ASA President Karen Kafadar spoke on The Critical Role of Statistics in Evaluating Forensic Evidence at Harvard University’s Science Center. Dr. Kafadar introduced us to issues in using statistics in forensic sciences, in particular highlighting forensic DNA, the assessment of bullet lead evidence, the US anthrax invesitations and the reliability of eyewitness identification. In some cases, patterns typically used as signals in forensic evidence have not proved as reliable as initially thought. Dr. Kafadar urged statisticians to play a role in improving the evaluation of forensic evidence, data that will ultimately be used as evidence in the criminal justice system.

May 3, 2019: BCASA Third Annual Boston Pharmaceutical Symposiumtook place at Pfizer’s building in Cambridge Massachusetts. Nearly 100 statisticians gathered to discuss statistical methodological research and its applications to biotech and pharmaceutical industry, and to develop connections. The participants had a wide variety of backgrounds, representing industry and academia, senior investigators, students and postdocs, and many were first-time attendees of BCASA events. More information regarding the speakers, and the slides of the presentations, are available here.

March 7, 2019: Mosteller Statistician of the Year Awards Dinnerwas held at Simmons. The honoree and speaker was Professor Constantine Gatsonis, Department of Biostatistics and Center for Statistical Sciences, Brown University. The title of the presentation was “Radiomic markers for diagnosis and prediction: Promise and hype”. If you missed the event, please see photos here.

January 19, 2019: Winter Potluck Dinner and Party held at the Springhouse retirement community in Boston. This event was hosted by Judy and Herman Chernoff, one of the chapter's star members, along with their daughter Miriam and son-in-law Stan Morse. This was a joyous event and the attendance was good in spite of the fact that a big winter storm was predicted for that evening. Many thanks to the hosts and to all who attended! Rather than cancelling the event all together, the starting time was pushed forward from 6:30 pm to 5:30 pm and the ending time from 9 pm to 8 pm. Joe Blitzstein, the chapter’s new president made his second scheduled appearance. A smash hit. Some thirty BCASA members and friends appeared and greatly enjoyed the event. They didn’t forget to bring an excellent potpourri of delicious culinary treats. Sitting at four round tables while other mingled, members met old friends and made new ones. Everyone appeared to have a great time! If you missed the event or would like to revisit it, please see photos here.

November 14, 2019: Evening presentation titled “Stratified Micro-Randomized Trials with Applications in Mobile Health” held at MIT. The speaker was Professor Susan Murphy of Harvard. The abstract of her well-received presentation was as follows: "Technological advancements in the field of mobile devices and wearable sensors make it possible to deliver treatments anytime and anywhere to users like you and me. Increasingly the delivery of these treatments is triggered by detections/predictions of vulnerability and receptivity. These observations are likely to have been impacted by prior treatments. Furthermore, the treatments are often designed to have an impact on users over a span of time during which subsequent treatments may be provided. Here, we discuss our work on the design of a mobile health smoking cessation study in which the above two challenges arose. This work involves the use of multiple online data analysis algorithms. Online algorithms are used in the detection, for example, of physiological stress. Other algorithms are used to forecast at each vulnerable time, the remaining number of vulnerable times in the day. These algorithms are then inputs into a randomization algorithm that ensures that each user is randomized to each treatment an appropriate number of times per day. We develop the stratified micro-randomized trial which involves not only the randomization algorithm but a precise statement of the meaning of the treatment effects and the primary scientific hypotheses along with primary analyses and sample size calculations. Considerations of causal inference and potential causal bias incurred by inappropriate data analyses play a large role throughout."

October 19, 2018: Short course titled “The Introduction to the Analysis of Incomplete Data” held at Boston University. The course was organized by the American Statistical Association’s Council of Chapters and offered to the chapter under their Traveling Short Course Program. The course was taught by Dr. Ofer Harel, Professor of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Harel demonstrated that ignoring the missing data problem and/or using ad hoc techniques can have serious consequences on the validity of the analysis. Biased results and inefficient estimates are just some of the risks of incorrectly dealing with incomplete data. The course introduced and compared more principled solutions to the missing data issue, including the use of likelihood methods, the EM algorithm, Bayesian methods, Multiple Imputation, and semi/non-parametric methods. Numerical examples along with software for implementing various methods were discussed throughout the course.

September 25, 2018: Boston Chapter event to celebrate Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching of Statistics. This event was held at Brown University School of Public Health and the awardee was Professor Nick Horton from Amherst College. Professor Horton gave a presentation titled “Introductory Statistics in a World of Data Science: Where We Are and Where We Need to Head”. The talk surveyed introductory statistics and biostatistics courses in an era of data science, and discussed questions regarding the role of computation, how to balance the needs of general education students and future statistics and data science students, the role of the statistical analysis cycle, pathways to support student success, faculty development, and the relationships between high school and college preparation.

September 22, 2018: StatFest 2018 Held at Amherst College. StatFest is a one-day event aimed at encouraging undergraduate students from under-represented groups to consider graduate studies and careers in the statistical sciences. Ensuring that the statistics profession reflects the diversity of our society is one of the strategic planning goals of the American Statistical Association. This year's event welcomed 150 students and professions from more than 90 institutions. The attendees included undergraduate and graduate students, emerging professionals, and established leaders in academia, government, and industry.

May 16, 2018: “Statistics and Data Science in Nutrition Research”, held at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. The program at this meeting was designed to familiarize the audience with some innovative educational initiatives and some on-going research activities involving statistics and data science in the nutrition program at Tufts University. The program included a presentation on the “Stats Beyond the Basics (SBB)” education initiative by Tania Alarcon, followed by lightning talks on “Forecasting famine and infectious outbreaks” by Anastasia Marshak, Ryan Simpson, and Aishwarya Venkat, and “Visualizing time-referenced data” by Elena Naumova. Since this was the last Chapter meeting for the 2017-18 program year, the election of five new officers for 2019 was also conducted at this event. Thanks to all who attended. And thanks to the Tufts University Student Chapter of the ASA, Tufts Friedman School, and Tufts HNRCA for supporting this event.

May 4, 2018: Second Annual Pharmaceutical Symposium hosted by Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. This was a full-day event organized by the Boston Chapter in collaboration with researchers from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Inc, and Cytel Inc. The program focused on statistical issues and challenges that arise in the Pharma area and featured presentations by well-known biostatisticians from academia as well as industry. The event was well attended by more than 65 statisticians from across many pharmaceutical and biotech companies. All attendees enjoyed the excellent presentations and they are all looking forward to next year's symposium. The Boston Chapters extends its appreciation to Takeda Pharmaceuticals for hosting the event and thanks the organizers as well as the attendees for making the day a great success.

April 27, 2018: Statistics Symposium to Celebrate the 95th Birthday of Herman Chernoff held at Harvard University on Friday April 27. Professor Chernoff's research contributions extend to areas such as design and sequential analysis, optimization and control, nonparametric methods, large sample theory, and statistical graphics. To celebrate his 95^th birthday and his many professional contributions, a symposium was held in his honor at Harvard University. The symposium was co-sponsored by the Harvard Statistics Department, the Boston Chapter of the ASA, and the newly formed New England Statistics Society (NESS), which originates from the New England Statistical Symposium championed by Professor Chernoff in 1987. The program included presentations by former students, colleagues, and friends of Herman. This was a memorable event honoring a distinguished member and a long-time friend of our Chapter. To watch videos from this event, please click on the following links: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. (contributed by Statistics Department at Harvard University)

February 21, 2018: Mosteller Statistician of the Year Awards Dinner held at Harvard Medical School. This year's winner was Professor Sharon-Lise Norman who received this award for outstanding literature contributions, mentoring of junior faculty, and dedicated service to the profession.

January 20, 2018: BCASA Winter Potluck Dinner and Party. There was plenty of food and good company at the BCASA Winter Potluck Dinner and Party held in Carlisle on Saturday, January 20. This was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and to meet many new ones. Thanks to all who attended. Also, many thanks to Tom and Judy Lane for hosting this event.

December 5, 2017: Awards Dinner. A dinner to celebrate the BCASA Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching of Statistics was held at Harvard University on December 5. Dr. Joseph Blitzstein of Harvard was this year’s recipient. At the event, Dr. Blitzstein's gave a presentation entitled "Storytelling in Statistics", where he demonstrated how probability and statistics can be made interesting and relevant to students through the use of stories and real-life examples.

November 4, 2017: A Fall Social and Mini-Conference was held at University of New Hampshire (UNH) in Durham, NH on Saturday November 4. The event was co-sponsored by the Boston Chapter and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the UNH. The speakers included Tevfik Aktekin, UNH; Beth Ziniti, Applied Geosolutions; Philip Ramsey, UNH; Mia Stephens, JMP, and Ernst Linder, UNH. The Chapter thanks the speakers for their excellent presentations. The Chapter is also grateful to the many attendees who participated in the discussions and helped make the day both fun and productive.

October 13, 2017: Around seventy people attended a Short Course on Applied Longitudinal Analysis held at Boston University on October 13, 2017. The course was offered by the ASA under the Traveling Course program and was organized locally by the Boston Chapter and the BU Student Chapter of the ASA (BUSCASA). The course was taught by Dr. Garrett Fitzmaurice, Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The material was drawn from his bestselling textbook, Applied Longitudinal Analysis, which he co-authored with Nan Laird and Jim Ware. The course provided an excellent introduction to statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal data emphasizing the practical aspects of the topic. The presentation included a discussion of linear mixed effects models for continuous responses and extensions of generalized linear mixed models for binary and count data. Numerical examples were used for illustration throughout the course.

September 9, 2017: A one-day Workshop on R and RStudio was held at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester on September 9, 2017. The workshop was given by Professor Nick Horton of Amherst College. A key goal was to introduce the participants to teaching applied statistics courses using computing in an integrated way. Dr. Horton has been using R and RStudio to teach statistics to undergraduates at all levels for the last decade and shared his approach and favorite examples. Topics included workflow in the RStudio environment, providing novices with a powerful set of tools for statistical computing, simple data wrangling, data visualization, and basic statistical inference using R. The approach referred to as "Less Volume, More Creativity" can be facilitated using the mosaic package available in R. The workshop was designed to be accessible to those with little or no experience with R and intended to provide participants with skills, examples, and resources that they can use in their own teaching.The presentation was excellent and well received by the many participants.

May 18, 2017: An evening presentation entitled “Gun Violence Prevention: Data and Statistical Issues” given by Professor David Hemenway from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on May 18 at Bentley University. The speaker noted that the United States has the highest rates of firearm death and injury of any high-income country. However, while data and empirical research have been crucial in many areas of public health, there have been deliberate attempts not to collect data on gun violence, to make collected data inaccessible to researchers, and to limit funds for research. The speaker discussed such data and funding issues, along with the use and misuse of statistics in firearms research.

May 5, 2017: A one-day workshop on the "Design and Monitoring of Adaptive Clinical Trials" given by Cyrus Mehta and Cytel Inc. at Takeda Pharmaceuticals on May 5. In addition to providing an overview of recent developments and best practices in the area, the workshop included hands-on training for East, the industry standard clinical trial design software tool. The participants learned how to design, monitor and simulate fixed, group sequential and adaptive trials with one arm, two or multiple arms, for binary, continuous or time-to-event endpoints. The presentation also described several other new features in the software.

April 8, 2017: A short course entitled “Introduction to Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data”was held in the Science Center at Harvard University on April 8. The course was given by Dr. Christopher Wikle, Curator’s Distinguished Professor of Statistics at the University of Missouri, and was brought to us by ASA’s Council of Chapters under its Traveling Short Course Program. This course gave a contemporary presentation of spatio-temporal processes and data analysis, covering visualization and exploratory methods, covariance based models, basis function models, dynamic models, and nonlinear dynamic models. The treatment was excellent and much appreciated by the attendees.

March 8, 2017: The Mosteller Statistician of the Year Awards banquet held at Simmons College on March 8, 2017. The honoree and speaker was Dr. David Schoenfeld, Professor Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Founding Director of the Biostatistics Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His presentation entitled “The Infrequent Bayesian” was very well received by the large audience.

November 16, 2016: Late afternoon lecture entitled “Technical solutions for practical problems in accounting for risk in Massachusetts’ Medicaid program” was given by Professor Arlene Ash from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. This event was held at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

November 11, 2016: A short course on “The Statistical Analysis of Network Data” held at Boston University on November 11, 2016. The short course was given by Professor Eric Kolaczyk from Boston University. The course was organized into roughly two halves of equal length. Topics for the first half included manipulation, visualization, and descriptive analysis of network data. The second half included topics pertaining to statistical modeling and inference in network analysis. The examples presented in the course were drawn from a variety of domain areas, with emphasis on computational biology and neuroscience and on social networks.

October 18, 2016: A late afternoon lecture on “Understanding P-Values and the Controversy Surrounding Them” was given by Jessica Utts, ASA President at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on October 18. Her presentation focused on ASA’s “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values” which provides six principles for the proper use and interpretation of p-values and statistical significance.

October 12, 2016: A BCASA evening lecture entitled “Adventures in Music Analytics” was given by Professor Dominique Haughton of Bentley University.

May 24, 2016: A BCASA evening lecture on “Significance roulette, the sampling distribution of the P value, and strategies for tackling the replication” was given by Geoff Cumming, Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. The event, which was held at Brandeis University, also included the election of new chapter officers. The event was well attended and a lively discussion followed Dr. Cumming’s presentation. In case you missed the event, the following two videos were later shared with us by Dr. Cumming: http://tiny.cc/SigRoulette1 and http://tiny.cc/sigRoulette2

March 23, 2016: An evening event on “The Future of Clinical Trials: A Panel Discussion”, held at the Kendall Square Marriott in Cambridge on March 23, 2016. The panelists included Ralph D’Agostino, Patrick Marquis, Cyrus Mehta, Bob O’Neill, Marc Pfeffer, and David Schoenfeld. The event was moderated by Scott Evans from Harvard School of Public Health. The discussion topics included: personalized medicine, clinical trial master protocols, orphan drug development, adaptive trial designs, optimizing endpoints to meet the trial objectives, and patient reported outcomes.