Congratulations to the Kalispel Tribe Camas Education Program for a 2026 WNAR Indigenous Student Travel Award! They coordinated middle and high schoolers to attend the 2026 WNAR Expanding Opportunities Workshop.

Congratulations to the students who participated in the 2026 WNAR Student Award Competition, and to our winners of the written paper and oral presentations:

WINNER OUTSTANDING WRITTEN PAPER AWARD

Feier Chang, University of Pittsburgh, “Privacy-Preserving Population-Level Inference for Multicenter EHR Data via Fed-GEE”

WINNER OUTSTANDING ORAL PRESENTATION AWARD

Chloe Mattila, Medical University of South Carolina, “GRASS-NB: Group-Structured Variable Selection for Spatial Negative Binomial Data with Applications to Cancer Registry and Spatial Omics”

RUNNER-UP PAPER AWARD

Saksham Jain, University of Washington, “Conditional Distributional Treatment Effects: Doubly Robust Estimation and Testing”

RUNNER-UPS ORAL PRESENTATION AWARD

Weiqi (Grace) Li, Oregon State University, “Benchmarking Cell-Type-Specific Spatially Variable Gene Detection Methods Using a Realistic and Decomposable Simulation Framework”

Karen Kanaster, University of Colorado Anschutz, “A Mixed Hawkes Model: An Application to Epileptic Seizures”

The students were honored at the banquet at the 2026 WNAR Annual Meeting in Pullman, Washington. All winners received monetary awards and certificates. We give special thanks to the chair of the student paper competition, Yuan Wang (Washington State University), and the judges on the committee who read papers and observed oral presentations.