JSM 2027 Student Paper Competition

The Health Policy Statistics Section (HPSS) of the American Statistical Association (ASA) invites submissions to its student paper competition for the 2027 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), to be held August 8–12, 2027, in Chicago, Illinois. The competition is an excellent opportunity for students to showcase their research, gain recognition, and launch their professional careers. HPSS has received submissions of very high quality in previous years. If you have a teaching or mentoring role, please bring this call to the attention of your students and encourage them to apply.

Competition focus. Papers should show thorough and appropriate statistical analyses of health policy problems, issues, or questions pertinent to the goals of the ASA Health Policy Statistics Section. Papers that advance statistical theory or methodology are also encouraged, provided they are sufficiently motivated by problems in health policy.

Awards. Up to five winners will be selected. Each winner will receive:

1. An $800 (USD) award

2. An award certificate

3. A ticket to the HPSS Speaker with Lunch at JSM 2027

Eligibility.

1. Currently enrolled undergraduate or graduate students at any level are eligible, as are those who graduated in 2026 and wish to present research they conducted as students.

2. The applicant must be the first author of the paper if there are co-authors.

3. The applicant must be a member of the ASA Health Policy Statistics Section.

Additional requirements. The following general policies apply to all ASA section student paper competitions.

1. Students may submit papers to no more than two sections and may accept only one section’s award. A student who wins and accepts an award must inform both sections, which removes the student from the other section’s competition.

2. Winners must submit an abstract and register for JSM 2027 through the official JSM abstract submission system by February 1, 2027.

3. Winners must present their paper in the HPSS student paper topic-contributed session at JSM 2027.

4. Winners are encouraged to attend the HPSS mixer on Monday evening of JSM, where awards are presented.

Application materials.

1. A cover letter with the applicant’s name, current affiliation, status (including actual or intended graduation date), contact information (mailing address, telephone, and email), and a brief description of how the paper relates to health policy statistics.

2. An abstract of up to 1,200 characters.

3. Two versions of the paper, one blinded and one unblinded. In the blinded version, remove author names and affiliations, acknowledgments, funding statements, GitHub or other links, and any other information that could reveal the identity of an author. The combined text of each version (title, abstract, keywords, manuscript body, acknowledgments, supplemental information, and references) should not exceed 25 pages, excluding tables and figures, in a single-column, double-spaced format on A4 or US letter paper with 12-point font.

4. A letter from the advisor certifying the student’s status or recent graduation and describing the student’s primary contribution to the research and the write-up.

How to submit. Email all materials as PDF files, in a single message, to Mingzhao Hu at hu.mingzhao@mayo.edu. Please use the subject line “HPSS 2027 Student Paper – [Your Last Name].” We will confirm receipt by email.

Important dates.

Submission deadline: 11:59 p.m. ET, Sunday, November 15, 2026

Notification of winners: by January 15, 2027

Contact. For additional information, please contact Mingzhao Hu, HPSS Program Chair-Elect (2026–2027), at hu.mingzhao@mayo.edu.

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Past Winners

 

2026 Winners

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Martha Barnard, University of Minnesota, "Partially Retargeted Balancing Weights for Causal Effect Estimation under Positivity Violations"

Jiayi Hu, University of Minnesota, "A Bayesian Multivariate Meta-Analysis Model Incorporating a Monotonicity Constraint in Longitudinal Smoking Abstinence"

Lingxuan Kong, University of Michigan, "Optimizing Organ Transplant Decision on Continuous Time through Backward Ensemble Adaptive Segmentation Trees"

Jose Palacio, Rice University, "Inferring Transmission Dynamics of RSV from Houston Wastewater Data"

Constantin Schmidt, University of Cambridge, "A Fully Bayesian Causal Factor Model to Evaluate England’s Hepatitis C Peer Support Program"

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2025 Winners

Durbadal Ghosh, Florida State University, “Analysis of spatially clustered survival data with

unobserved covariates using SBART”

Chanhwa Lee, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, “Nonparametric causal survival analysis with clustered interference”

Namhwa Lee, University of California – Riverside, “A joint modeling approach to treatment effects estimation with unmeasured confounders”

Chen Liu, University of Pittsburgh, “Heterogeneous causal mediation analysis with Bayesian additive regression trees”

Justin Weltz, Duke University, “Reinforcement learning for respondent-driven sampling”

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2024 Winners

Na Bo, University of Pennsylvania, “A meta-learner-based framework to analyze treatment heterogeneity in survival outcomes: application to pediatric asthma care under COVID-19 disruption”

 

Eric Cohn, Harvard University, “Risk Set Matched Difference-in-Differences for the Analysis of Effect Modification in an Observational Study on the Impact of Gun Violence on Health Outcomes”

 

Anya Helene Fries, Stanford University, “Penalized landmark supermodels (penLM) for dynamic prediction for time-to-event outcomes in high-dimensional data: application to lung cancer mortality prediction integrating multiple data sources”

 

Gary Hettinger, University of Pennsylvania, “Robust Estimation and Transportation of Causal Effect Curves for Difference-in-Differences Designs”

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Ziren Jiang, University of Minnesota, “Enhancing modified treatment policy effect estimation with weighted energy distance”​

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2023 Winners

Sierra Pugh, Colorado State University, "A hierarchical Bayesian model for estimating age-specific COVID-19 infection fatality rates in developing countries"

Jiayi Tong, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, "A new end-to-end data aggregation approach for comparing hospital performance without sharing patient-level data"

Nicolas Hartman, University of Michigan, "Individualized Empirical Null Estimation for Exact Tests of Healthcare Quality"

Haolin Li, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Inverse Probability of Censoring Weighted Super Learner for Survival Prediction in Case-Cohort Studies"

Larry Han, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, "Privacy-Preserving and Communication-Efficient Hospital Quality Measurement"

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2022 Winners

Joseph Feldman, Rice University, "A Bayesian Framework for Generation of Fully Synthetic Mixed Datasets"

Anqi Yin, Georgetown University, "Doubly robust semiparmateric U-statistic with applications in biomedical studies"

Augustine Wigle, University of Waterloo, "Bayesian unanchored additive models for component network meta-analysis"

Xingruo Zhang, University of Chicago, "Defining R-Squared Measures for Mixed-Effects Location Scale Models"

Chenqi Fu, Penn State University, "Evidence synthesis with reconstructed survival data"

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2021 Winners

Kaitlyn Cook, Harvard University, “Stratified Proportional Hazards Models for Clustered Interval-Censored Data”

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Yige Li, Harvard University, “Effectiveness of Localized Lockdowns in the COVID-19 Pandemic”

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Ernesto Ullao, University of Washington, “Improved Matching via Augmented Propensity Score Estimation”

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Yizhe Xu, University of Utah, “A Conditional Random Forest Approach to Estimating the Most Cost-effective Individualized Treatment Rule”

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Bo Zhang, University of Pennsylvania, “Social Distancing and COVID-19: Randomization Inference for a Structured Dose-Response Relationship”

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2020 Winners

Alyssa Bilinski, Harvard University. “Nothing to see here? Non-inferiority approaches to parallel trends and other model assumptions”

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Xiaofei Chen, Southern Methodist University. “Estimating the Optimal Timing of Surgery from Observational Data”

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Qianheng Ma, University of Chicago. “A Shared-Parameter Location-Scale Growth Model to Link Non-ignorable Nonresponses in the Self-Initiated Event-Contingent EMA Assessments to Subject’s Mood Change and Mood Stability”

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Yulia Sidi, University of Connecticut. “Non-inferiority clinical trials: treating margin as missing information”

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Zekun Xu, North Carolina State University. “Treatment regimes with frequent treatment changes”

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2019 Winners

Christoph Kurz.  Helmholtz Zentrum München. "The Effect of Bariatric Surgery on Health Care Costs: A Synthetic Control Approach Using Bayesian Structural Time Series"

 

​Shirley Liao, Harvard University.  "Posterior Predictive Treatment Assignment Methods for Causal Inference in the Context of Time-Varying Treatments"

 

​James Normington, U. Minnesota. "A Bayesian difference-in-difference framework for the impact of primary care redesign on diabetes outcomes"

 

​Zhixing Xu, Florida State University. “A Latent Class Based Joint Model for Recurrence and Termination with Application to Heart Transplants”

 

​Jincheng Zhou, U. Minnesota. "A Bayesian Hierarchical CACE Model Accounting for Incomplete Noncompliance Data in Meta-analysis"

2018 Winners
Devick Katrina. Harvard University. "The Role of Body Mass Index at Diagnosis on Black-White Disparities in Colorectal Cancer Survival: A Density Regression Mediation Approach"

Tom Chen. Harvard University. "A stochastic second-order generalized estimating equations approach for estimating association parameters under informative missingness"
 
Mingyang Shan. Brown University. "Bayesian Record Linkage Under Limited Linking Information"
 
Qinshu Lian. U. Minnesota. "Correcting for Exposure Misclassification in Meta-analysis: A Bayesian Approach"

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Jincheng Zhou. U. Minnesota. "Bayesian Hierarchical Model Estimating CACE in Meta-Analysis"
 

2017 Winners
Yifei Wang, UC Davis Biostatistics, “Joint Indirect Standardization when Only Marginal Distributions are Observed in the Index Population”

Qian Guan, NC State Statistics “A principled policy-optimized Bayesian nonparametric formulation of periodontal recall intervals”
 
Jeff Boatman, Minnesota Biostatistics, “Estimating Causal Effects from a Randomized Clinical Trial when Noncompliance is Measured with Error”
 
David Cheng, Harvard Biostatistics, “Estimating Average Treatment Effects with a Response-Informed Calibrated Propensity Score"

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Alex Kaizer, Minnesota Biostatistics, “Dynamic Multi-Resolution Smoothing Using Multi-Source Exchangeability Models”
 

2016 Winners
Edward Kennedy, University of Pennsylvania, “Nonparametric methods for doubly robust estimation of continuous treatment effects”

Georgia Papadogeorgou, Harvard University, “Towards adjustment for completely unobserved spatial confounding”
 
Laura Forastiere, University of Florence and Harvard School of Public Health, “Identification and estimation of causal mechanisms on clustered encouragement designs: Disentangling bed nets using Bayesian principal stratification”
 
Qinshu Lian, University of Minnesota, “A Bayesian hierarchical summary receiver operating characteristic model for network meta-analysis of diagnostic tests”

 

Patrick Schnell, University of Minnesota, “A Bayesian credible subgroups approach to identifying patient subgroups with positive treatment effects”
 

2015 Winners
Hong Zhao, University of Minnesota, "Hierarchical Bayesian Approaches for Detecting Inconsistency in Network Meta-Analysis"

 

Jingjing Zou, Columbia University, "Transplant Allocation Strategies" 

 

Liangyuan Hu, Brown University, "Estimating causal effect of treatment initiation time on mortality from observational data when both exposure and outcome are subject to censoring: Application to timing of cART initiation in HIV/TB co-infection"

 

Robert Ashmead, US Census Bureau, CSRM, "Health Care Policy Evaluation using Propensity Score Matching: A Study of Care Consistent with a Patient-Centered Medical Home using a Large Population Survey"

 

Caleb H Miles, Harvard University, "Quantifying an Adherence Path-Specific Effect of Antiretroviral Therapy in the Nigeria PEPFAR Program"

2014 Winners
Zhengyi Zhou, Cornell University, "A Spatio-Temporal Point Process Model For Ambulance Demand"

Michael Lopez, Brown University ; Roee Gutman, Brown University, "Matching To Estimate The Causal Effects From Multiple Treatments"

Hyunseung Kang, University of Pennsylvania, "Instrumental Variables Estimation With Some Invalid Instruments And Its Application To Mendelian Randomization" 

Jeanette Birnbaum, University of Washington, "Projecting Benefits And Harms Of Novel Cancer Screening Biomarkers: A Study Of Pca3 And Prostate Cancer"

Fan Yang, Wharton, "Using Post-Quality Of Life Measurement Information In Censoring By Death Problems"

2013 Winners
Hwanhee Hong, Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, "A Bayesian Missing Data Framework for Generalized Multiple Outcome Mixed Treatment Comparisons"

Thomas Murray, Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, "Composite Kaplan-Meier and Commensurate Bayesian Models for Combining Current and Historical Survival Information"

David Vock, formerly a student in the Department of Statistics at NC State University. Now an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, "Assessing the Causal Effect of Organ Transplantation on the Distribution of Residual Lifetime"

Xiaoye Ma, Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, "A Hybrid Bayesian Hierarchical Model Combining Cohort and Case-control Studies for Meta-analysis of Diagnostic Tests: Accounting for Disease Prevalence and Partial Verification Bias"
 
Megan Schuler, Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "Effectiveness of Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatments: Is Biological Drug Testing Sufficient?"

2012 Winners
Ludi Fan, University of Michigan, "Comparing Cumulative Incidence Functions Between Nonrandomized Groups"

Hwanhee Hong, University of Minnesota, "Hierarchical Bayesian Methods for Combining Efficacy and Safety in Multiple Treatment Comparisons"

So Young Kim, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "More Efficient Estimators for Case-Cohort Studies"

Gregory J. Matthews, University of Massachusetts, "Assessing the Privacy of Randomized Vector--Valued Queries to a Database Using the Area Under the Receiver-Operating Characteristic Curve"

Cheng Zheng, University of Washington, "Causal Mediation Analysis in Multi-Level Intervention and Multi-Component Mediator Case"

2011 Winners
John Graves, Harvard University, "Health Care Reform and the Dynamics of Uninsurance: Lessons from Massachusetts"

Vinh Nguyen, University of California at Irvine, "Robust Inference in Semiparametric Discrete Hazard Models for Randomized Clinical Trials"

Zheyu Wang, University of Washington, "Accessing Diagnostic Accuracy with Ordinal Symptom Statuses Under the Absence of a Gold Standard"

Dan Yang, University of Pennsylvania, "Optimal Matching with Minimal Deviation from Fine Balance in a Study of Obesity and Surgical Outcomes"

Jose R. Zubizarreta, University of Pennsylvania, "Contrasting Evidence Within and Between Institutions That Supply Treatment in an Observational Study of Alternative Forms of Anesthesia"

2010 Winners
Mike Baiocchi, University of Pennsylvania, "Near/Far Matching: Building a Stronger Instrument"

Dhiman Bhadra, University of Florida, "Bayesian Semiparametric Analysis of Case-Control Studies with Time-Varying Exposures"

Roee Gutman, Harvard University, "Full Bayesian Procedure for File Linking to Analyze End-of-Life Medical Costs"

Gregory J. Matthews, University of Connecticut, "Assessing Privacy Using the Area Under the Receiver-Operator Characteristic Curve"

Jessica Amelia Myers, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "Regression Adjustment and Stratification by Propensity Score in Treatment Effect Estimation"

2009 Winners
Sean Devlin, University of Washington," Identification of Ovarian Cancer Symptoms in Health Insurance Claims Data"

Sandrah P. Eckel, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "Surrogate Screening Models for Determining Low Physical Activity in the Cardiovascular Health Study"

Carrie Hosman, University of Michigan, "Sensitivity Analyses for Omitted Variable Bias in Multiple Regression in a Study of Right Heart Catheterization"

Jessica A. Myers, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "Learning from Near Misses in Medication Errors: A Bayesian Approach"

Rui Wang, Harvard University, "Nonparametric Inference Procedure for Percentiles of the Random Effects Distribution in Meta-Analysis"

2008 Winners
Shoshana R. Daniel, University of Pennsylvania, "An Algorithm for Optimal Tapered Matching, with Application to Disparities in Survival"

Wen Gu, University of Washington, "Estimating the Capacity for Improvement in Risk Prediction with a Marker"

Nan Hu, University of Washington, "A New Synthesis Method for Multiple Linear Regression"

Megan Othus, Harvard University/Dana Farber Cancer Institute, "A Class of Semiparametric Mixture Cure Survival Models with Dependent Censoring"

Jamie Perin, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Semiparametric Efficient Estimator for Incomplete Longitudinal Binary Data with Application to Smoking Trends"

2007 Winners
Benjamin French, University of Washington, "Analysis of Longitudinal Data To Evaluate a Policy Change"

Ying Huang, University of Washington, "Evaluating Predictive Capacity of Continuous Biomarkers"

Michael Law, Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare, "Is Newer Always Better? Re-evaluating the Benefits of Newer Pharmaceuticals"

Charles Minard, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, "Testing for Trends in a Two-State Markov Model with Applications in Smoking Cessation Studies"

Qing Pan, University of Michigan, "Evaluating Bias Correction in Weighted Proportional Hazards Regression"

2006 Winners
Phillip Dinh, University of Washington, "Nonparametric Statistical Methods for a Cost-Effectiveness Analysis"

Ulysses Diva, University of Connecticut, "Extending the Capture-Recapture Methodology To Estimate Disease Subpopulation Sizes in the Presence of Cross-Classification"

Haijun Ma, University of Minnesota, "Hierarchical and Joint Site-Edge Methods for Medicare Hospice Service Region Boundary Analysis"

Kate Stewart, Harvard University, "Understanding Self-Reported Disability among the Elderly: a Novel Use of Anchoring Vignettes"

Justin Timbie, Harvard University, "Methods for Profiling the Value of Hospital Care Following Acute Myocardial Infarction"

2005 Winners
Rebecca Boehm, Medical University of South Carolina, "On the Utility of Stochastic Models of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease"

Manuela Buzoianu, Carnegie Mellon University, "Optimal Bayesian Design for Patient Selection in a Clinical Trial"

Eloise Kaizar, Carnegie Mellon University, "Do Antidepressants Cause Suicide in Children? A Bayesian Metaanalysis"

Hai (Kevin) Lin, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, "A Comparison of Estimators of Population Slope under Informative Dropout"

John Robinson, Johns Hopkins University, "A Hierarchical Multivariate Two-Part Model for Profiling Providers' Effects on Health Care Charges"

2004 Winners
Jeff M. Allen, ACT and University of Iowa, "Comparison of Fixed and Random-effects Methods for Predicting Cancer Incidence in Iowa Counties Using SEER Data"

Marianne Bertolet, Carnegie Mellon University, "Inclusion of Sampling Weights in Mixed-Effects Models: A Comparison of Two Methods"

Yulei He, University of Michigan, "Handling Missing Longitudinal Covariates in Child-development Study: A Functional Multiple Imputation Approach"

Douglas Levy, Harvard University, "Covariate Adjustment in Clinical Trials with Nonignorable Missing Data and Noncompliance"

Maria E. Montez, Boston University, "Statistical Model Comparisons for Prediction of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Cost in the Veterans Health Administration"

2003 Winners
Anirban Basu, University of Chicago, "Estimating Marginal and Incremental Effects on Health Outcomes Using Flexible Link and Variance Function Models"

Alex de Leon, University of Alberta, "General Mixed-Data Model: Extension of General Location and Grouped Continuous Models"

I-Chan Huang, Johns Hopkins University, "Application of a Propensity Score Approach for Risk Adjustment in Multiple Physician Group Profiling on Asthma Care"

Roberto Leon-Gonzalez, University of York, "Health and Wages in Britain: An Empirical Analysis"

Min Zhang, Cornell University, "Profiling Pharmacy Expenditures in Managed Health Care: Bayesian Inference for a Two-Part Hierarchical Model"

2002 Winners
Doug Schaubel, University of North Carolina, “Regression Modelling of Gap Time Hazard Functions for Serial Failure Time Data”

Rivka Yanetz, Bar-Ilan University, “Application of the Proportion Explained to the Analysis of Length of Stay in Hospital after Surgery”

Bingming Yi, North Caroline State University, “A Factorial Design to Optimize Cell-Based Drug Discovery Analysis”