Stephanie Lustgarten Honored for Top Student Biostats Paper.

Stephanie Lustgarten is the winner of the 2013 Department of Biostatistics Student Paper Competition for her entry, Non-Parametric Prediction of Event Times for Analysis of Failure-time Data with Interval Censoring. Stephanie will receive a $750 travel award from the department to use in attending a statistics or genetics conference.

Lustgarten’s work involved the development of a new Bayesian nonparametric method to predict when a sufficient number of subjects will have had an event to allow monitoring of a clinical trial with a time-to-event outcome and intermittent assessments of the outcome. The reviewers were: Gheorghe Doros, an associate professor of biostatistics; Michael Lavalley, a professor of biostatistics; and and Yorghos Tripodis, an assistant professor of biostatistics.

The reviewers noted that Lustgarten’s paper presented a solid overview of the problem addressed, and also commended the quality of the paper’s methodological work as “very good and innovative.” Lustgarten’s work was also described as being relevant in many applications, but especially in “clinical trials which are an important component of biostatistics.”

Lustgarten is a PhD candidate in biostatistics who came to BUSPH after receiving a master’s degree from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell.