Congratulations to Mikaela Nishida for a 2025 WNAR Indigenous Student Travel Award! Mikaela Nishida is a Ph.D. student of Statistics at the University of California Irvine, and she is Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian).
Congratulations to the 28 students who participated in the 2025 WNAR Student Award Competition, and to our winners of the written paper and oral presentations:
WINNER OUTSTANDING WRITTEN PAPER AWARD
Angela Dahl, University of Washington, “A Bayesian Joint Longitudinal-Survival Model in Calendar Time for Epidemic Settings”
WINNER OUTSTANDING ORAL PRESENTATION AWARD
Christian Bernal Zelaya, University of California, Irvine, "Forecasting healthcare utilization using wastewater surveillance data."
RUNNER-UPS PAPER AWARD
Mikaela Nishida, University of California, Irvine, "Modified Nested Case-Control Designs for Assessing Effect Modification in Underrepresented Subpopulations"
Jessalyn Sebastian, University of California, Irvine, "Gaussian Process Priors with Markov Properties for Effective Reproduction Number Estimation"
Sungtaek Son, University of Washington, "Dimension reduction and covariate balancing for learning individualized treatment regimes"
RUNNER-UPS ORAL PRESENTATION AWARD
Shibai Zhang, University of Victoria, "A Conditionally Markovian Reformulation of Memory-Mediated Animal Movement Using Cognitive Maps"
Adam Birnbaum, University of California, Irvine, "Decomposing Interaction-Effect Estimands in Generalized Linear Models for Isolating True Effect Modification"
Kayla Irish, University of Washington, "Simple Covariate Adjustment Using Stable Balancing Weights"
The students were honored at the banquet at the 2025 WNAR Annual Meeting in Whistler, British Columbia. All WNAR participants received travel awards, and winners received additional monetary awards and certificates. We give special thanks to the chair of the student paper competition, Brian D Williamson (Kaiser Permanente) and the judges on the committee who read papers and observed oral presentations.
Please encourage your students to participate in the competition in 2026! Abstracts and papers will be due in the late winter 2026. More information can be found on the Student Paper Award website.
