The Mental Health Statistics Section of the ASA recently completed its Student Paper Award Competition. In all, fourteen papers were received from U.S. students. Students were eligible if they were current undergraduate or graduate students at any level, as well as those who graduated in 2018 but submitted research they conducted as students. The quality of the submissions was remarkable, with many worthy contributions. Each paper was judged in terms of the importance of the problem in mental health and the quality of the statistical methodology, application, and writing. Following a careful and deliberate review process, the section is pleased to announce the following winner of the award as the highest rated paper:
Zhou Lan, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University
A Spatial Bayesian Semiparametric Mixture Model for Positive Definite Matrices with Applications to Diffusion Tensor Imaging
In addition, we would like to give honorable mention to other papers that were reviewed very favorably:
Daphne Lew, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Saint Louis University
Mapping Rates of Inpatient Hospitalizations Related to Mental Disorders in the State of Missouri: A Conditional Autoregressive Model with Zip Code-Level Data
Hyung Park, Department of Biostatistics, Columbia University
A Functional Additive Model for Estimating Interactions Between a Treatment and a Large Number of Functional/Scalar Covariates
The section offers its congratulations to the honorees, and a cash prize of $1000 has been awarded to Zhou Lan to cover his JSM 2019 expenses. The winner will present his research at JSM 2019. The award will also be announced at the Mental Health Statistics Section Mixer at JSM 2019.