Blog

Each year, our department produces, presents, and publishes hundreds of papers and software packages. We are pleased to recognize some of the best work from the past year:

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Left to right, top: Savannah Obregon, Cole Beck, Shawn Garbett, Onur Orun. Bottom: Bryan Blette, Shengxin Tu, Bryan Shepherd

The IT Innovation Award celebrates the creative and crucial contribution that IT members make to department operations, and to the research program within the department, across the medical center, and more broadly. The 2023 IT Innovation Award goes to application developer Savannah Obregon, senior application developer Cole Beck, and director of informatics software development Shawn Garbett for REDCapAPI: Interface to REDCap. The review panel commented that while the package was "initially conceived to export the raw API from REDCap into R, it has grown dramatically. Its features collectively ensure reliable and automated retrieval of REDCap data in a format that is ready for analysis." It is deserving of the award because it "provides a robust tool for researchers, aiding them in conducting efficient and effective research studies and is being used both inside VUMC and at institutions such as Meharry Medical College, Harvard Medical School, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, University of Colorado, Virginia Tech, Indiana and others."

The Linda Stewart Analysis Report Award recognizes an exceptional applied analysis report written by a staff biostatistician in our department. ​The winner of the 2023 award is Onur Orun, for a BRAIN-ICU long-term outcomes latent trajectory analysis report, co-authored by associate professor Rameela Raman. The judges for this award stated that "the report is extremely well polished, including high quality figures and tables combined with a thoroughly comprehensive view of the study with solid explanations of background and summary of results."

The Patrick Arbogast Collaborative Publication Award recognizes an exceptional collaborative publication from a biostatistician in our department. Assistant professor ​Bryan Blette received this award for "Is low-risk status a surrogate outcome in pulmonary arterial hypertension? An analysis of three randomised trials," which was published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine (October 2023) with co-authors at Penn, Brown, Yale, and Cedars-Sinai. According to the judges, "This biostatistician first-authored paper provided convincing evidence for the invalidity of a widely accepted and used surrogate outcome in clinical care and trials. It serves as an outstanding example of how biostatisticians influence medical practice in a critical and positive manner." 

The Methods Publication Award recognizes an exceptional methodological publication from a biostatistician or team of biostatisticians in our department. It was awarded to recent graduate Shengxin Tu (PhD, 2024) and professor Bryan Shepherd for "Rank intraclass correlation for clustered data," which was published in Statistics in Medicine (August 2023) with co-authors at University of Southern California and University of North Carolina. The judges wrote: "This paper introduces a novel rank-based approach to Intraclass Correlation Coefficient that enhances its robustness and applicability, showcasing a solid theoretical foundation and notable methodological creativity. The inclusion of real-world examples, comprehensive simulation results, and an accompanying R package heighten its practical value."

The winners receive personalized plaques and $200, and their names are added to the awards wall in the department, on the 11th floor of 2525 West End Avenue. The list of past winners is posted in the About section of this website.

We are immensely grateful to the faculty and staff who contributed their time and expertise to evaluating and discussing this year's entries. The panel was divided into separate committees for each award, with results relayed to an administrator who compiled and announced the results at the September All-Department Meeting. Judges did not participate on the committees of awards they were in contention for. This year's slate of volunteers:

Bradley Malin, Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, and Computer Science, is co-director of ADVANCE (AI Discovery and Vigilance to Accelerate Innovation and Clinical Excellence) and quoted in the article.

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Nicole Gunnison to senior business process manager, in effect as of September 1. A graduate of Milligan College (now Milligan University) in East Tennessee, with a bachelor's degree in psychology, Gunnison worked in finance, accounting, and non-profit administration before joining Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2018, first as an accounting clerk and then as a budget/accounting analyst specializing in post-award financial support (i.e., administrative management of grant-funded research projects) for multiple departments. In 2022, she became the department's business process manager, leading comprehensive HR support and effort management for faculty, staff, and trainees; with this promotion, she will shoulder additional responsibilities in areas such as immigration and other global support processes. Her expertise with Workday and other systems has been absolutely vital to department operations, and she has an abiding interest in public health, human rights, economic empowerment and poverty alleviation, and other humanitarian causes, which has included volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. 

Congratulations to research assistant professor Chih-Yuan Hsu (first author) and professors Qi Liu and Yu Shyr (corresponding authors) on the publication of A distribution-free and analytic method for power and sample size calculation in single-cell differential expression in Bioinformatics. The paper addresses potential deviations from true data distribution in power and sample size calculation by offering a new method, scPS, that "stands out by making no assumptions about the data distribution and considering cell-cell correlations within individual samples. scPS is a rapid and powerful approach for designing experiments in single-cell differential expression analysis." There are web versions of scPS's independent two-group comparison and paired-group comparison tools as well.

An illustration of sample sizes and cells per sample in aiming toward a power of .80. This is Figure 1.2-1 in the independent file set for the scPS package on GitHub.

Co-authors include senior associate Yuwei Zhu and biostatistician Cass Johnson.

Congratulations to research assistant professor Jing Wang, the 2024 winner of our department's Faculty Development Award. Her proposal was deemed the best in a field of highly competitive submissions for a one-year pilot grant. Dr. Wang will use this funding to support an investigation that she hopes to build into a larger project: “Taking advantage of the dramatically increasing number of single-cell transcriptomics and epigenomics studies, the project aims to develop cell-type-specific enhancer-mediated regulatory maps for functionally interpreting and prioritizing enhancer risk variants and causal genes.” Dr. Wang is shown here describing her project at the August 2024 faculty meeting, when the award was announced. Her accomplishments include first-authorship of a 2023 paper in Cancers (Basel) on small RNA profiling in human extracellular vesicles,