Colleen Chan, a PhD student in Yale's Department of Statistics and Data Science, won the Florence Nightingale award, co-sponsored by the International Biometric Society (IBS) and the Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS) at the 31st International Biometric Conference (IBC 2022) held in Riga, Latvia. This award is given to "most outstanding eligible candidate who has demonstrated exceptional scholarship", where eligible candidates include students and early researchers within 5 years of their PhD.
She presented her work with Donna Spiegelman and Xin Zhou, of Yale's Center for Methods for Implementation and Prevention Science and Department of Biostatistics, titled "Nonparametric Estimation of the Potential Impact Fraction and Population Attributable Fraction with Individual-Level and Aggregated Data" at the Young Statistician Showcase session. Five papers (one each from Africa, Asia & Australasia, Europe, North America, and South America) are selected for presentation in the Young Statistician Showcase, where Colleen's work was the winner for the North America macro-region.
This work was motivated by Dr. Spiegelman's mini-sabbatical several years ago at the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Mexico City, Mexico. INSP had been engaged in work investigating the impact of widespread sugar-sweetened beverage consumption on Mexico's rapidly increasing obesity and diabetes epidemics. Dr. Tonatiuh Barrientos-Gutierrez, INSP's Director of the Center for Population Health Research, with INSP colleagues and co-authors Rodrigo Zepeda-Tello and Dalia Camacho-Garcia-Formenti noted some anomalies in the calculations of the impact fraction, leading to the current work.