SDNS Student Paper Competition

Eligibility

This competition is open to all undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers that are at most two years beyond their terminal degree. The author must be a member of the SDNS Section or should join the section at the time of the paper submission. The winner will have the opportunity to present the paper in a topic-contributed session sponsored by SDNS.

The contribution may be a theoretical development or it may cover any of the numerous applications related to defense or national security. This paper competition is for completed research. A manuscript suitable for journal submission is required to enter the competition. Published papers are eligible if (1) the paper had not previously won an ASA-funded student paper competition, and (2) the paper was accepted within the past two years. 

General principles for ASA student paper competitions apply. In particular, note that students may submit papers to no more than two sections. 

Guidelines for Manuscript Preparation

Manuscripts will be judged based on relevance and interest of the subject matter, the quality of writing, and of course the quality of the research itself. Entrants should submit the following:

1. A list of authors and contact information (the contestant must be the first author).
2. A double-spaced, publication-ready manuscript in two versions: a regular manuscript with author information and a blinded manuscript without author information or other identifying information (such as references). Both versions should include an abstract.
3. A reference letter from a faculty member familiar with the submitted work, stating the status of the applicant and the publication status of the manuscript.

All required materials for the Student Paper Award Competition must be submitted by November 15th to the Student Paper Award Committee, via email at SDNS.Amstat@gmail.com. The email should include the two versions of the completed manuscript as attachments in PDF format. Please include the words "SDNS Student Paper Competition" in the subject line of the email. 

Award

The winning author will receive a certificate and a travel award of $500 to defray costs for attendance and presentation of their work at an ASA sponsored conference. Please note that the financial award will likely not cover all of a winner's travel, so the winner will need to supplement the travel award with other funds.

Applicants will be notified by January 15th. Winners of the SDNS student paper competition must submit an abstract to the topic contributed session under SDNS and register for the conference by February 1st through the official conference abstract submission system.

The SDNS awarded the 2025 Best Student Paper Award to Federico Veneri of Iowa State University for his paper titled, "Synthetic Anchoring Under the Specific Source Problem." The award was presented at the 2025 DATAWorks in Alexandria, Virginia.

The SDNS awarded the 2024 Best Student Paper Award to Gavin Collins for his paper titled, "Bayesian Projection Pursuit Regression" The award was presented at the 2024 DATAWorks in Alexandria, Virginia.

The SDNS awarded the 2023 Best Student Paper Award to Andrew Simpson for his paper titled, "Finite Mixture Modeling for Hierarchically Structed Data with Application to Keystroke Dynamics" The award was presented at the 2023 Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto.

The SDNS awarded the 2022 Best Student Paper Award to Roshni Anna Jacob for her paper titled, "HOT-Nets: Higher-Order Topological Neural Networks on Power Distribution Systems." The award was presented at the 2022 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC.

From Left: Roshni Anna Jacob (2022 Award Recipient) and Karl Pazdernik (SDNS Chair)

The SDNS awarded the 2021 Best Student Paper Award to Yuzhou Chen of Southern Methodist University for the paper titled, “Topological Adversarial Learning on Graphs.” Yuzhou presented her paper virtually as part of the 2021 Joint Statistical Meetings and was presented the award at the SDNS Mixer.

The SDNS awarded the 2020 Best Student Paper Award to Monisha Yuvaraj for the paper titled, “Harnessing Multilayer Network and Topological Data Analysis for Mitigating Impact of Climate Change on Insurance”. The award was presented virtually at the JSM 2020 SDNS Mixer and Monisha presented her paper at the 2021 Joint Statistical Meetings.

The SDNS awarded the 2019 Best Student Paper Award to Asim Kumer Dey for the paper titled, “What do Network Motifs Tell us about Robustness and Reliability of Complex Networks?”. The award was presented at the 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver, CO.

From Left: Nick Clark (Chair of the Paper Award Committee), Asim Kumer Dey (2019 Award Recipient), and Jane Pinelis (SDNS Chair)