Award Recipients Highlights - Philadelphia Chapter

HIGHLIGHTS FOR OUR RECENT AWARD RECIPIENTS
Research Excellence Award Dr. Sanat K. Sarkar, the Cyrus C. K. Curtis Professor of Statistics at Temple University, is the recipient of the 2025–2026 Research Excellence Award. Over a four-decade career, he has made seminal contributions to multiple hypothesis testing and false discovery rate (FDR) control, fundamentally strengthening the theoretical foundations of modern high-dimensional inference. Dr. Sarkar is internationally recognized for his landmark 1997 and 1998 papers resolving the long-standing Simes conjecture. By proving that the Simes inequality holds under multivariate total positivity of order two (MTP2), he provided essential justification for widely used multiple testing procedures in correlated settings. This breakthrough is fundamental to safeguarding against false discoveries in many fields where dependencies between test statistics are ubiquitous. He has significantly expanded FDR theory, extending the BH method to broad families of stepwise procedures, developing generalized error metrics, and pioneering structured multiple-testing frameworks that simultaneously control error rates at the group and individual levels. With more than 100 publications in premier journals and continuous NSF support as a Principal Investigator since 2003, Dr. Sarkar’s impact is profound and enduring. A Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, he remains a defining force in the global statistical community. Teaching Excellence Award Dr. Paul Bernhardt is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Teaching Excellence Award for the College/University level. Dr. Bernhardt is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Villanova University. Over the past thirteen years, Dr. Bernhardt has demonstrated an exceptional commitment to the profession of teaching statistics. He has taught eight graduate and seven undergraduate courses, worked with five PhD students, and mentored many undergraduate and master’s students. Dr. Bernhardt was instrumental in creating a statistics major at Villanova in 2019, and he has served as the Director of the Villanova Applied Statistics and Data Science master’s program for the past six years. Dr. Bernhardt was awarded two teaching development grants at Villanova and received the University’s Mid-Career Service Award in 2025, largely for his teaching-related contributions. His students describe him as enthusiastic, approachable, knowledgeable, and dedicated. One student perhaps summarized his commitment best: “What impacted me most was his genuine interest in our futures; his mentorship has had a lasting influence on my confidence, direction, and passion for statistics.” In addition to teaching, Dr. Bernhardt publishes regularly in the areas of biostatistics and nursing, and he actively serves the statistics profession in various ways. Ms. Beth Benzing, an AP Statistics and math teacher from Strath Haven High School, Wallingford, PA, is the recipient of the 2025-2026 K-12 Teaching Excellence Award. She is praised by colleagues and students for her passion for helping students appreciate the subjects she teaches and for her leadership in the community of statistics teachers. In her class, Ms. Benzing would always include innovative activities (e.g., Barbie bungee, etc.) that make the lessons fun and engaging. Her dedication often goes beyond the classroom, with office hours and an after-school club, so students understand not just formulas but also data literacy and confidence. In her professional community, Ms. Benzing is a critical member of PASTA (Philadelphia Area Statistics Teachers Associations), hosting meetings to bring local teachers together to share best practices in teaching statistics. She has also served as both president and vice president of the Philadelphia-area NCTM affiliate, which created supplemental instructional videos for the book The Practice of Statistics. She was also a leader and contributor to the NFS grant titled “Integrating the Statistical Investigation Process, Data Visualization, and Simulations into High School Statistics.” She regularly attends or gives teaching workshops at national conferences with fellow teachers to learn new tools to help her students better understand statistics. Recently, she designed a new course on Data Analytics so that her students at all academic levels can improve their understanding of data and its applications. She has been an AP Reader for AP Statistics for over 14 years and has served as Table Leader since 2022. Practice Excellence Award Jason J.Z. Liao, PhD, FASA, the recipient of the 2025-2026 Excellence in Statistical Practice Award, is an accomplished biostatistical leader with over two decades of experience advancing statistical science across the full spectrum of pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug development. He currently serves as Associate Vice President of Biostatistics at Incyte, where he leads strategic statistical innovation in early- and late-phase oncology development, AI/ML–enabled trial design, and regulatory engagement. Dr. Liao is internationally recognized for pioneering contributions in biosimilarity, bioassay development, oncology dose optimization, and non-proportional survival analysis. He is the author of the influential textbook Statistical Methods for Biological Assay. He has published extensively on adaptive designs, Bayesian methodologies, Dynamic Restricted Mean Survival Time (RMST), and innovative dose-finding strategies aligned with FDA’s Project Optimus. His work has directly shaped regulatory thinking and practical implementation in biosimilars, vaccines, biologics, and oncology therapeutics. Prior to Incyte, Dr. Liao held senior leadership roles at Merck, Novartis, Teva, Eisai, and Pfizer, where he guided numerous successful global submissions and mentored statisticians. Known as a “teaching manager,” he bridges rigorous statistical theory with real-world clinical decision-making. An elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Dr. Liao has served as President of the ASA Philadelphia Chapter and remains deeply committed to professional service, mentorship, and advancing statistical practice for impacts in many fields of medicine and public health. Exceptional Graduate and Undergraduate Student Achievement Award Ana Ferariu, a fourth-year doctoral student at Drexel University, is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Graduate Students. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Drexel University and an M.S. in Statistics from Lehigh University and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Applied Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Drexel. Ana has demonstrated outstanding academic performance and scholarly productivity, including two first-author publications in highly regarded journals and five additional manuscripts under review or in progress. She has presented her work at national and international conferences spanning cognitive neuroscience, statistics, bioinformatics, and developmental science. Ana has also gained applied research experience through a biostatistics internship at Jefferson University and, most recently, as an AI/Data Science Intern at Proscia. She has demonstrated sustained commitment to teaching excellence, serving as a Teaching Assistant for 9 academic quarters across 5 courses, and is deeply engaged in mentoring both graduate and undergraduate students. Beyond research and teaching, Ana is active in the scientific community through her involvement with the ASA and programs such as Neurohackademy. A former member of Romania’s Olympic basketball program and a Division I athlete at Drexel, Ana brings discipline, collaboration, and leadership to her scientific work and academic community. Mr. Haoyu Zhou is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Graduates. Haoyu is an outstanding fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Temple University and a recipient of the Temple University Presidential Fellowship, whose work demonstrates remarkable achievement in methodological innovation, collaborative research, and professional service. His dissertation advances Bayesian variable-by-variable multiple imputation and missingness-mechanism testing for nonignorable and clustered electronic health record data—methods that are both theoretically rigorous and directly motivated by pressing public health questions about post-COVID-19 conditions. Haoyu has already produced impactful scholarly outputs, including co-developing the CRAN R package twangMediation (over 12,000 downloads) and co-authoring a peer-reviewed publication in BMC Medical Research Methodology, alongside multiple national and international conference presentations. Beyond research, he has demonstrated strong commitment through service on departmental committees and high-quality teaching contributions as a teaching assistant, and is widely recognized for his intellectual independence, creativity, and excellent communication skills. Collectively, his record reflects a rare combination of methodological depth, applied relevance, and professional engagement that makes him highly deserving of this award. Ms. Shaohui Zhang, a 2nd-year Master of Science student in Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Graduate Students. Even though she is only a MS student, Shaohui has demonstrated strong academic performance and an impressive research record with several publication-ready scholarly productivity that substantially exceeds typical expectations for master-level training. Shaohui has led or contributed to multiple high-quality research projects with outputs spanning both foundational methodology and applied medical artificial intelligence evaluation, specific examples include: a first-author methodological manuscript in preparation on the dynamic spillover causal effect estimation under interference, a first-author manuscript currently under review at NPJ Digital Medicine evaluating GPT-5 multimodal diagnostic agents, and a second-author manuscript currently under submission on integrating causal reasoning and verification into chain-of-thought prompting (Causal-CoT). Additionally, Shaohui has also demonstrated exceptional potential in teaching and mentorships to fellow students, and strong engagement in interdisciplinary research collaborations. Aiwen Li is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Undergraduate Students. Aiwen is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring for a Bachlor of Scince degree in economics, with an intended minor in statistics. In addition to being consistently outstanding and successful in her academic endeavors, Aiwen has participated in projects with faculty from Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative, where she led a research project in tennis analytics that won her the first prize of Reproducible Research Competition at the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference 2025, and a paper is currently under review at the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. She also developed Python algorithms to improve kernel density estimation as a Research Fellow in an NSF-funded REU program she participated at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and she presented this work at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings. Aiwen has also taken on substantial leadership responsibilities on campus, including serving as Co-President of both the National Research Conference at Penn and the Wharton Undergraduate Statistics Society. She has been clear and consistent about her intention to pursue a PhD in Statistics after completing her undergraduate degree, and she approaches her current research and coursework with that long-term goal in mind.

HIGHLIGHTS FOR OUR RECENT AWARD RECIPIENTS

Research Excellence Award

Dr. Sanat K. Sarkar, the Cyrus C. K. Curtis Professor of Statistics at Temple University, is the recipient of the 2025–2026 Research Excellence Award. Over a four-decade career, he has made seminal contributions to multiple hypothesis testing and false discovery rate (FDR) control, fundamentally strengthening the theoretical foundations of modern high-dimensional inference. Dr. Sarkar is internationally recognized for his landmark 1997 and 1998 papers resolving the long-standing Simes conjecture. By proving that the Simes inequality holds under multivariate total positivity of order two (MTP2), he provided essential justification for widely used multiple testing procedures in correlated settings. This breakthrough is fundamental to safeguarding against false discoveries in many fields where dependencies between test statistics are ubiquitous. He has significantly expanded FDR theory, extending the BH method to broad families of stepwise procedures, developing generalized error metrics, and pioneering structured multiple-testing frameworks that simultaneously control error rates at the group and individual levels. With more than 100 publications in premier journals and continuous NSF support as a Principal Investigator since 2003, Dr. Sarkar’s impact is profound and enduring. A Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, he remains a defining force in the global statistical community.

Teaching Excellence Award

Dr. Paul Bernhardt is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Teaching Excellence Award for the College/University level. Dr. Bernhardt is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Villanova University. Over the past thirteen years, Dr. Bernhardt has demonstrated an exceptional commitment to the profession of teaching statistics. He has taught eight graduate and seven undergraduate courses, worked with five PhD students, and mentored many undergraduate and master’s students. Dr. Bernhardt was instrumental in creating a statistics major at Villanova in 2019, and he has served as the Director of the Villanova Applied Statistics and Data Science master’s program for the past six years. Dr. Bernhardt was awarded two teaching development grants at Villanova and received the University’s Mid-Career Service Award in 2025, largely for his teaching-related contributions. His students describe him as enthusiastic, approachable, knowledgeable, and dedicated. One student perhaps summarized his commitment best: “What impacted me most was his genuine interest in our futures; his mentorship has had a lasting influence on my confidence, direction, and passion for statistics.” In addition to teaching, Dr. Bernhardt publishes regularly in the areas of biostatistics and nursing, and he actively serves the statistics profession in various ways.

Ms. Beth Benzing, an AP Statistics and math teacher from Strath Haven High School, Wallingford, PA, is the recipient of the 2025-2026 K-12 Teaching Excellence Award. She is praised by colleagues and students for her passion for helping students appreciate the subjects she teaches and for her leadership in the community of statistics teachers. In her class, Ms. Benzing would always include innovative activities (e.g., Barbie bungee, etc.) that make the lessons fun and engaging. Her dedication often goes beyond the classroom, with office hours and an after-school club, so students understand not just formulas but also data literacy and confidence. In her professional community, Ms. Benzing is a critical member of PASTA (Philadelphia Area Statistics Teachers Associations), hosting meetings to bring local teachers together to share best practices in teaching statistics. She has also served as both president and vice president of the Philadelphia-area NCTM affiliate, which created supplemental instructional videos for the book The Practice of Statistics. She was also a leader and contributor to the NFS grant titled “Integrating the Statistical Investigation Process, Data Visualization, and Simulations into High School Statistics.” She regularly attends or gives teaching workshops at national conferences with fellow teachers to learn new tools to help her students better understand statistics. Recently, she designed a new course on Data Analytics so that her students at all academic levels can improve their understanding of data and its applications. She has been an AP Reader for AP Statistics for over 14 years and has served as Table Leader since 2022.

Practice Excellence Award

Jason J.Z. Liao, PhD, FASA, the recipient of the 2025-2026 Excellence in Statistical Practice Award, is an accomplished biostatistical leader with over two decades of experience advancing statistical science across the full spectrum of pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug development. He currently serves as Associate Vice President of Biostatistics at Incyte, where he leads strategic statistical innovation in early- and late-phase oncology development, AI/ML–enabled trial design, and regulatory engagement. Dr. Liao is internationally recognized for pioneering contributions in biosimilarity, bioassay development, oncology dose optimization, and non-proportional survival analysis. He is the author of the influential textbook Statistical Methods for Biological Assay. He has published extensively on adaptive designs, Bayesian methodologies, Dynamic Restricted Mean Survival Time (RMST), and innovative dose-finding strategies aligned with FDA’s Project Optimus. His work has directly shaped regulatory thinking and practical implementation in biosimilars, vaccines, biologics, and oncology therapeutics. Prior to Incyte, Dr. Liao held senior leadership roles at Merck, Novartis, Teva, Eisai, and Pfizer, where he guided numerous successful global submissions and mentored statisticians. Known as a “teaching manager,” he bridges rigorous statistical theory with real-world clinical decision-making. An elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Dr. Liao has served as President of the ASA Philadelphia Chapter and remains deeply committed to professional service, mentorship, and advancing statistical practice for impacts in many fields of medicine and public health.

Exceptional Graduate and Undergraduate Student Achievement Award

Ana Ferariu, a fourth-year doctoral student at Drexel University, is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Graduate Students. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Drexel University and an M.S. in Statistics from Lehigh University and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Applied Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Drexel. Ana has demonstrated outstanding academic performance and scholarly productivity, including two first-author publications in highly regarded journals and five additional manuscripts under review or in progress. She has presented her work at national and international conferences spanning cognitive neuroscience, statistics, bioinformatics, and developmental science. Ana has also gained applied research experience through a biostatistics internship at Jefferson University and, most recently, as an AI/Data Science Intern at Proscia. She has demonstrated sustained commitment to teaching excellence, serving as a Teaching Assistant for 9 academic quarters across 5 courses, and is deeply engaged in mentoring both graduate and undergraduate students. Beyond research and teaching, Ana is active in the scientific community through her involvement with the ASA and programs such as Neurohackademy. A former member of Romania’s Olympic basketball program and a Division I athlete at Drexel, Ana brings discipline, collaboration, and leadership to her scientific work and academic community.

Mr. Haoyu Zhou is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Graduates. Haoyu is an outstanding fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Temple University and a recipient of the Temple University Presidential Fellowship, whose work demonstrates remarkable achievement in methodological innovation, collaborative research, and professional service. His dissertation advances Bayesian variable-by-variable multiple imputation and missingness-mechanism testing for nonignorable and clustered electronic health record data—methods that are both theoretically rigorous and directly motivated by pressing public health questions about post-COVID-19 conditions. Haoyu has already produced impactful scholarly outputs, including co-developing the CRAN R package twangMediation (over 12,000 downloads) and co-authoring a peer-reviewed publication in BMC Medical Research Methodology, alongside multiple national and international conference presentations. Beyond research, he has demonstrated strong commitment through service on departmental committees and high-quality teaching contributions as a teaching assistant, and is widely recognized for his intellectual independence, creativity, and excellent communication skills. Collectively, his record reflects a rare combination of methodological depth, applied relevance, and professional engagement that makes him highly deserving of this award.

Ms. Shaohui Zhang, a 2nd-year Master of Science student in Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Graduate Students. Even though she is only a MS student, Shaohui has demonstrated strong academic performance and an impressive research record with several publication-ready scholarly productivity that substantially exceeds typical expectations for master-level training. Shaohui has led or contributed to multiple high-quality research projects with outputs spanning both foundational methodology and applied medical artificial intelligence evaluation, specific examples include: a first-author methodological manuscript in preparation on the dynamic spillover causal effect estimation under interference, a first-author manuscript currently under review at NPJ Digital Medicine evaluating GPT-5 multimodal diagnostic agents, and a second-author manuscript currently under submission on integrating causal reasoning and verification into chain-of-thought prompting (Causal-CoT). Additionally, Shaohui has also demonstrated exceptional potential in teaching and mentorships to fellow students, and strong engagement in interdisciplinary research collaborations.

Aiwen Li is the recipient of the 2025-2026 Exceptional Achievement Award for Undergraduate Students. Aiwen is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring for a Bachlor of Scince degree in economics, with an intended minor in statistics. In addition to being consistently outstanding and successful in her academic endeavors, Aiwen has participated in projects with faculty from Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative, where she led a research project in tennis analytics that won her the first prize of Reproducible Research Competition at the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference 2025, and a paper is currently under review at the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. She also developed Python algorithms to improve kernel density estimation as a Research Fellow in an NSF-funded REU program she participated at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and she presented this work at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings. Aiwen has also taken on substantial leadership responsibilities on campus, including serving as Co-President of both the National Research Conference at Penn and the Wharton Undergraduate Statistics Society. She has been clear and consistent about her intention to pursue a PhD in Statistics after completing her undergraduate degree, and she approaches her current research and coursework with that long-term goal in mind.