American Statistical Association recognizes biostatistics doctoral student

Kalins Banerjee, a PhD in Biostatistics candidate from Penn State College of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences, won the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) 2021 Student Paper Award from the American Statistical Association’s Biometrics Section.

Banerjee was one of five awardees selected from 81 submissions.

As a recipient, he will present his paper, “An Adaptive and Powerful Multivariate Test for Microbiome Association Analysis via Feature Selection,” during the association’s Joint Statistical Meetings on Saturday, Aug. 7 through Thursday, Aug. 12, in Seattle.

Researchers are studying associations between microbial features and human health or disease conditions. In his paper, Banerjee introduced a novel perspective of using dimension reduction techniques under the multivariate microbiome association analysis framework. The proposed methodology serves as a robust and powerful multivariate association testing tool. It also provides insight on the taxa that are more likely to drive the detected association, potentially leading to cost-effective downstream validation and functional studies.

Coauthors on the research include Banerjee’s advisor Xiang Zhan, assistant professor of public health sciences, and Jun Chen from Mayo Clinic.

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