IBS/WNAR Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship
The WNAR of IBS Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship was established in 2021 to recognize an outstanding individual or team, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or citizenship, who has made a significant impact on our society through service and/or research in the development and application of statistical, mathematical, and data science theory and methods in the biomedical or environmental sciences. A significant impact can comprise either a single contribution of extraordinary merit or an outstanding aggregate of contributions to the biomedical and environmental sciences.
The recipient is announced at the WNAR Annual Meeting in June, gives the Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) later that summer, and receives a plaque and a one-year WNAR membership.
Call for Nominations: 2027 Award
Nomination deadline: Sunday, November 15, 2026
The 2027 recipient will give the award lecture at JSM 2027 in Chicago, Illinois (August 8–12, 2027).
- Read the full call, eligibility, and nomination guidelines
- Download the nomination form (.docx) and the short CV template (.docx)
- Submit your nomination here
Questions? Email the Awards Committee at awards@wnar.org.
Past Award Recipients
2026
University of California, Los Angeles
Marc Suchard with Jessica Minnier at the award lecture, JSM 2026 in Boston.
Dr. Marc Suchard is Professor in the Departments of Biomathematics, Biostatistics and Human Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Suchard is a world leader in statistical computing and Bayesian inference, with significant contributions to phylogenetics, epidemic modeling, bioinformatics, and health informatics. He is specifically recognized for his work expanding Bayesian methods and applications for phylogeny, his contributions to health policy and informatics through the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) initiative, and his work developing impactful software such as MrBayes, BEAST, and BEAGLE. WNAR is very proud of its outstanding members, represented by Dr. Suchard.
Award Lecture: JSM 2026, Boston, Massachusetts. “Inference for discrete-valued stochastic processes in infectious diseases.” (session details)
2025
Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado
Dr. Debashis Ghosh is Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Informatics at the Colorado School of Public Health. Dr. Ghosh’s nomination package clearly demonstrated his highly impactful research contributions to biometrics and to science at large. He is specifically recognized for his statistical innovation and excellence in recurrent event analysis and genomics, for rigorous evaluation of kernel machines used in machine learning, and for his contributions to the development of the popular cancer genomics database ONCOMINE.
Award Lecture: JSM 2025, Nashville, Tennessee. Thursday, August 7, 2025, 10:30 am. “Distances and Sufficiency in the Age of AI.” (session details)
2024
Stanford University
Rob Tibshirani delivering the award lecture at JSM 2024 in Portland.
Dr. Robert J. Tibshirani is Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Statistics at Stanford University. Dr. Tibshirani’s nomination package clearly demonstrated his highly impactful research contributions to biometrics and to science at large. The lasso, his most renowned contribution, has ignited an entirely new realm of research and applications from genomics to finance, and is a cornerstone of modern data science.
Award Lecture: JSM 2024, Portland, Oregon. Monday, August 5, 2024, 2:00 pm. “Cooperative learning and cooperative components analysis.” (session details)
2023
University of California, Los Angeles
Steve Horvath receiving the award from WNAR President Elizabeth Juarez-Colunga at JSM 2023 in Toronto.
Dr. Steve Horvath is Professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Director of Aging Biology Research in the UCLA Department of Medicine. At the time of the award he was a Principal Investigator at Altos Labs, and he was previously Professor of Human Genetics and Biostatistics at UCLA. Dr. Horvath’s nomination package clearly demonstrated his highly impactful research contributions to bioinformatics and aging biology, especially his development of the widely used weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) method for studying biological networks, and his revolutionary development of the highly accurate and widely used epigenetic clocks (Horvath’s clocks) for age estimation based on DNA methylation data.
Award Lecture: JSM 2023, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Tuesday, August 8, 2023, 2:00 pm. “Epigenetic Clocks and Weighted Correlation Network Analysis.” (session details)
2022 · INAUGURAL RECIPIENT
University of California, Berkeley
Bin Yu receiving the inaugural award from WNAR President Gary Chan at JSM 2022 in Washington, DC.
Dr. Bin Yu is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor and Class of 1936 Second Chair in the Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Dr. Yu’s nomination package clearly demonstrated her fundamental contributions to both statistical theory and practice, with lasting impact across statistics and interdisciplinary domains; her visibility as a role model, especially for women researchers in many disciplines; and her outstanding leadership in professional and community service that has advanced the field and recognition of biometrics.
Award Lecture: JSM 2022, Washington, DC. Monday, August 8, 2022, 10:30 am. “Principles for Impactful Data Science and Statistics: Lessons Learned from Covid-19 Forecasting and Beyond.” (session details)