Megan Taylor Jones, center, discusses her poster, "Robust effect size index analysis using RESI R package," with Cara Lwin and other classmates at the Department of Biostatistics 20th anniversary celebration, September 2023. Photo: Susan Urmy / Vanderbilt University Medical Center
We are thrilled to celebrate the graduation of Megan Taylor Jones, whose phenomenal career as a student at Vanderbilt comes to a close this Friday, May 8, 2026. Her dissertation, "Theoretical Improvements and Practical Software for Standardized Effect Size Estimation with Applications to Neuroimaging and Machine Learning," was supervised by associate professor Simon Vandekar, and it will become available at Vanderbilt's Institutional Repository later this year.
Dr. Jones entered the graduate program in 2021 as a student on the master's track, after completing her bachelor's degree in public health at the University of Kentucky, with a mathematics minor. During her first semester, she learned about plans to develop an R package for the Robust Effect Size Index (RESI) during a faculty lightning talk given by Dr. Vandekar and reached out to him afterward about becoming involved with that project. Her collaborations with Dr. Vandekar and the other members of his lab have resulted in first authorship of "RESI: An R Package for Robust Effect Sizes" (Journal of Statistical Software, 2025) and Symptom Provocation and Clinical Response to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (JAMA Psychiatry, 2025); the second paper has been viewed more than 12,000 times within the past year, with a current Altmetric score of 148.
Dr. Jones was named Distinguished Teaching Assistant in 2024, served as Lead TA during 2024–2025, and won the WS Gosset Award for Exceptional Research in 2025. In addition to the papers named above, she has co-authored three other manuscripts that have appeared in peer-reviewed publications, with more to come (asterisks denote other researchers affiliated with Vanderbilt Biostatistics):
Mart MF, Jones MT, Raman R*, Stinehart KR, Mayer KP, Jackson JC, Pandharipande PP, Su H, Boehm LM, Ely EW, Brummel NE. Rurality and Long-Term Outcomes after Critical Illness. Ann Am Thorac Soc. 2026 Mar 18:aaoag063. doi: 10.1093/annalsats/aaoag063. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 41849412.
Kang K*, Seidlitz J, Bethlehem RAI, Xiong J*, Jones MT, Mehta K, Keller AS, Tao R*, Randolph A, Larsen B, Tervo-Clemmens B, Feczko E, Dominguez OM, Nelson SM; Lifespan Brain Chart Consortium; Schildcrout J*, Fair DA, Satterthwaite TD, Alexander-Bloch A, Vandekar S*. Study design features increase replicability in brain-wide association studies. Nature. 2024 Dec;636(8043):719-727. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08260-9. Epub 2024 Nov 27. PMID: 39604734; PMCID: PMC11655360.
Kang K*, Jones MT, Armstrong K, Avery S, McHugo M, Heckers S, Vandekar S*. Accurate Confidence and Bayesian Interval Estimation for Non-centrality Parameters and Effect Size Indices. Psychometrika. 2023 Mar;88(1):253-273. doi: 10.1007/s11336-022-09899-x. Epub 2023 Feb 1. PMID: 36725775; PMCID: PMC9977896. [One of the 5 most downloaded papers from the journal in 2023!]
Dr. Jones has also presented posters and delivered numerous talks at local and national conferences, including "Semiparametric Estimation of Predictive Correlation in Multivariate Brain-Wide Association Studies," an invited talk at ENAR 2026. We are confident that Dr. Jones and her work will appear in many more programs and journals in the years to come and wish her the best!