The 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings are taking place in Nashville, from August 2 through August 7. They are expected to bring together more than five thousand attendees from fifty-two countries (including more than a thousand students). This year’s theme is “Statistics, Data Science, and AI Enriching Society.” We are proud of the students, alumni, and other department participants contributing to the conference. The 2025 program includes the following:
Sunday, August 3
Unlocking the Power of Semiparametric Models: A Practical Tutorial for Analyzing Complex Data with Minimum Assumptions – short course – 1:00 pm
- Instructors include assistant professor Jinyuan Liu
Building Strong ASA Student Chapters: Strategies for Growth, Inclusivity, and Maximizing Value – invited panel session – 2:00 pm
- Panelists include Lucy D’Agostino McGowan (PhD 2018) and PhD candidate Alexis Fleming
- Organized by associate professor Robert Johnson
Creating Something from Nothing? Synthetic Data Analysis for Social Good and Policy Making – invited paper session – 2:00 pm
- Speakers include professor Bryan Shepherd, who will present “Creating, evaluating, and sharing synthetic data for multinational HIV cohorts”
Practical Implementation of Bayesian Approaches in Drug Development – topic-contributed paper session – 2:00 pm
- Discussants include professor Frank Harrell
Methods for multivariate response data with complex exposure-response relations – topic-contributed paper session – 4:00 pm
- “Pathway-Aware Low-Rank Factorization and Regression for Interpretable Multi-Omics Analysis” was co-authored by assistant professor Siyuan Ma.
Novel Statistical Methods for the Design and Analysis of Two-Phase Studies – topic-contributed paper session – 4:00 pm
- Organized and chaired by associate professor Ran Tao, who will present “Efficient Estimation of the Cox Model with Time-Varying Effects Under Two-Phase Designs” as part of the session
Risk Scores and Polygenic Modeling of Genomic and Genetic Data – contributed papers session – 4:00 pm
- Speakers include PhD student Kun Bai, who will present “Risk Score Prediction Model for Treatment Response in SLE Nephritis.” The paper’s co-authors include professor Fei Ye.
Monday, August 4
Section on Statistics in Imaging Contributed Session 2 – 8:30 am
- Speakers include PhD candidate Megan Jones, who will present “Semiparametric Correlation Estimation in Multivariate BWAS.” The paper’s co-authors include SyBBURE intern Ishaan Gadiyar, PhD student Xinyu Zhang, Kaidi Kang (PhD 2025), and associate professor Simon Vandekar.
Advances in Mendelian Randomization and Microbiome Studies – contributed papers session – 10:30 am
- Speakers include PhD student Chih-Ting Yang, who will present “Accounting for Unobserved Confounding to Reduce False Discoveries in Microbiome Research.” The paper’s co-authors include professor Yu Shyr and assistant professor Siyuan Ma.
Contributed Poster Presentations: Biometrics Section – 10:30 am
- Lisa Levoir (MS 2025) will present “Evaluating ML Approaches for Assessing Heterogeneity of Treatment Effect in Clinical Trials.” The poster was co-authored by associate professor Andrew Spieker and assistant professor Bryan Blette.
Navigating Challenges and Leveraging Opportunities in Biostatistics Graduate Education – invited panel session – 10:30 am
- Organized and chaired by professor Qingxia “Cindy” Chen
- Panelists include associate professor Andrew Spieker
- SyBBURE intern Ishaan Gadiyar will present “Benchmarking Spatial Co-Localization Methods for Single-Cell Multiplex Imaging Data of Cancers.” The poster was co-authored by associate professor Simon Vandekar.
- Research professor Irene Feurer will present “Refining Community Characteristic Composites Representing American Community Survey Item Data.”
Statisticians Leading the Way: Leveraging the All of Us Research Program Data to Advance Science – invited panel session – 2:00 pm
- Organized and chaired by assistant professor Cathy Shyr
- Panelists include professors Paul Harris and Qingxia “Cindy” Chen.
Statistics in Epidemiology + Biometrics Sections – joint mixer – 5:30 pm
- Sarah Lotspeich and other department members/alumni will be at this event.
Tuesday, August 5
PROPELling the Careers of People from Historically Marginalized Groups in Collaborative Statistics – invited panel session – 8:30 am
- Panelists include associate professor Mario Davidson, who co-organized the session
Beyond Academia: Exploring Statistics Careers in Industry, Government, and More – invited panel session – 10:30 am
- Chaired by PhD student Ashley Mullan
Contributed Poster Presentations: Section on Bayesian Statistical Science – 10:30 am
- Visiting scholar Kuo-Jung Lee will present “Joint Analysis of Lung Cancer Longitudinal and Survival Outcomes with a Heteroscedastic Covariance.” The poster’s co-authors include professor Yu Shyr.
Survival Analysis: Competing Risks, Composite & Multiple Events – contributed papers session – 10:30 am
- Speakers include assistant professor Qingyan Xiang, who will present “Estimation of the survival-incorporated median: a summary measure for outcomes truncated by death”
Contributed Poster Presentations: Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics – 2:00 pm
- PhD student Haoyue Li will present “Detecting and quantifying mediation of health outcomes by microbial communities.” The poster’s co-authors include assistant professor Siyuan Ma.
- PhD candidate Yan Yan will present “Stage-Specific BIN1 Effects Link Tau to Preclinical Functional Connectivity in Alzheimer’s Disease.” The poster’s co-authors include biostatistician Ke Xu and associate professor Hakmook Kang.
Contributed Poster Presentations: Section on Statistics in Sports – 2:00 pm
- MS student Zongyue Teng will present “Going for Gold: Using Record Linkage to Predict Winning Gymnasts at the 2024 Paris Olympics”
Statistics, Data Science, and AI for Complex Data in Reproducible Biomedical Research – invited paper session – 2:00 pm
- Speakers include assistant professor Cathy Shyr, who will present “Reproducibility of Large Language Models for Rare Disease Diagnosis Using Unstructured Electronic Health Records”
Wednesday, August 6
From reactive to proactive medicine: Statisticians’ evolving roles in the learning health system – invited paper session – 8:30 am
- Co-organized by assistant professor Gustavo Amorim and Sarah Lotspeich (PhD 2021).
- Bryan Shepherd is a co-author of “Assessing treatment effects in observational data with missing or mismeasured confounders: A comparative study of practical doubly-robust and traditional missing data methods”
- Dr. Lotspeich will present “Targeted partial validation to make EHR data au-dit they can be: Correcting for data quality issues in the learning health system” during the session.
SRMS/GSS/SSS Student Paper Competition Winners – topic-contributed paper session – 8:30 am
- PhD candidate Huiding Chen will present “Synthetic Sampling Weights for Volunteer-Based National Biobanks: A Case Study with the All of Us Research Program.” The paper’s co-authors include professor Qingxia Chen and senior biostatistician Andrew Guide.
Health Policy Statistics Section – lunch session (added fee) – 12:30 pm
- Professor William “Bill” Dupont is the featured invited speaker. He will present “Secret Shopper Study to Assess Access to Buprenorphine Treatment in Addicted Pregnant Women”
Biomarkers and Endpoints: Validating Clinical Trial Success – contributed papers session – 2:00 pm
- Speakers include visiting research scholar Jo-Ying Hung, who will present “Evaluation Methods for T-Association of a Surrogate Endpoint.” The paper’s co-authors include research assistant professor Chih-Huan Hsu and professor Yu Shyr.
Enhancing Power in Neuroscience: the Role of Statistical Innovation and Machine Learning – invited paper session – 2:00 pm
- Chaired by PhD candidate Megan Jones and organized by Kaidi Kang (PhD 2025)
- Dr. Kang will present “Study design features improve the replicability in brain-wide association studies.”
Thursday, August 7
From Compositional Microbiome Data to Longitudinal Biomarker Analysis: Cutting-Edge Statistical Methods – contributed papers session – 8:30 am
- PhD student Yunbi Nam co-authored “Variable Weighted Random Forest for Two-Phase Case-Control Studies.”
Latest Techniques in Risk Prediction Modeling – contributed papers session – 8:30 am
- Chaired by assistant professor Qingyan Xiang
Modern Statistical Methods for Advancing Biomedical and Neuroimaging Research – topic-contributed papers session – 10:30 am
- Speakers include assistant professor Panpan Zhang, who will present “A Covariate-Assisted Community Detection Algorithm with Applied to Functional Brain Network Data”
Machine Learning Meets Statistics: Challenges and Solutions in Robust Inference for Biomedical Data – topic-contributed papers session – 10:30 am
- Speakers include assistant professor Jinyuan Liu, who will present “On Semiparametric Efficiency of an Emerging Class of Regression Models for Between-subject Attributes.”
awards
- COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) Emerging Leader Award – Lucy D’Agostino McGowan (PhD 2018)
- Statistical Partnership Among Academe, Industry, and Government Award – Vanderbilt Biostatistics team led by associate professor Rameela Raman, with department alumni David Schleuter, Ryan Jarrett, Sarah Lotspeich, Jamie Joseph, Julia Thome, and Lisa Levoir, current students Joshua Slone, Alexis Fleming, and Ashley Mullan, and research assistant professor Lynne Berr (see the final listing on the ASA announcement page about 2025 honors)
Compilation in progress. Contact Peg Duthie to be added to this post.