Huiding "Eric" Chen wins ASA Student Paper Award
Congratulations to PhD candidate Huiding “Eric” Chen on the selection of “Synthetic Sampling Weights for Volunteer-Based National Biobanks: A Case Study with the All of Us Research Program” as one of five winning papers in the 2025 Student Paper Competition sponsored by American Statistical Association’s Consortium of Sections. The consortium consists of the ASA’s Government Statistics Section, Survey Research Methods Section, and Social Statistics Section. Papers entered the competition had to involve either a new statistical methodology or creative application of statistical analyses to a problem, issue, or policy question pertinent to the consortium’s subject areas.
As the author of a top student paper, Chen will receive a $1,000 stipend and present his work this August at a topic-contributed session during the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings. One of the largest statistical events in the world, JSM is expected to draw more than five thousand attendees from over fifty countries to Nashville. Alumna Christina Tripp Saunders (PhD 2018), now a statistical scientist at Berry Consultants, was a winner of the GSS/SRMS/SSS competition in 2018.
Chen earned his Bachelor of Natural Science degree in statistics at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China), a top Chinese educational institution, followed by his master’s degree in biostatistics at Georgetown University. His dissertation advisor is Qingxia “Cindy” Chen, professor of biostatistics, biomedical informatics, and ophthalmology & visual sciences, and contact PI for the NIH-funded DARSaW project (Developing, Assessing, and Refining Synthetic Sampling Weights to Improve Generalizability of the All of Us Research Program Data). Huiding Chen has served as a data and quantitative analyst for All of Us since 2022, developing novel statistical methods to improve the weighting methods for non-probability sampling cohorts and leveraging Big Microdata from national surveys (e.g., PUMS, NHIS, NHANES) for calibration. His publications include “Evaluation of inpatient medication guidance from an artificial intelligence chatbot” in American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy (2023).
First-authored paper in JAMIA by Andrew Guide
Congratulations to senior biostatistician Andrew Guide on first-authorship of "Balancing efficacy and computational burden: weighted mean, multiple imputation, and inverse probability weighting methods for item non-response in reliable scales," an article published in JAMIA: A Scholarly Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine on August 13. Co-authors include assistant in biostatistics Shawn Garbett, senior biostatistician Xiaoke (Sarah) Feng, and professor Qingxia (Cindy) Chen, who is the paper's corresponding author, with colleagues in VICTR, DBMI, and Ohio State's Department of Internal Medicine. The study examined ways of interpreting non-responses to the Physical Activity Neighborhood Environment Scale (PANES) in the All of Us survey and to what degree computationally intensive approaches are advisable. In the words of Guide and his co-authors, their goal is "to inform researchers on considerations for handling incomplete data in participant surveys, utilize the data received as efficiently and accurately as possible, and better understand how to use surveys with missingness to conduct accurate research." Guide, Garbett, Chen, and some other team members published another paper on interpreting All of Us data earlier this year; Guide, Garbett, and Feng also served as teaching asistants in this year's Summer Institute short course on the All of Us research program.
Figure 1 in Guide et al., "Balancing efficacy..." For the full caption, view the figure at its journal page or within the full paper.