Annual Report of Subcommittee / StCA [Student conference awards]
Report Date / 25/06/2016
Report Author(s) / Nadine Binder
Subcommittee Start date / Nov/1997
Chair /
  1. NadineBinder, Germany, since Aug/2015

Secretary /
  1. Katherine Lee, Australia, since Aug/2015

Members /
  1. Carl-Fredrik Burman (SE)since Jan/2008
  2. Richard Cook (CA)since Jan/2013
  3. Thomas Jaki (UK)since Aug/2013
  4. Ulrich Mansmann (DE)since Aug/2009
  5. Chris Metcalfe (UK)since Jan/2013
  6. Hein Putter (NL)since Aug/2013
  7. Dimitris Rizopoulos (NL)since Jan/2011
  8. Jeremy Taylor (US)since Jan/2013

Terms of Reference
Student conference awards are available for registered postgraduate students to attend the annual conference and present a paper. The Subcommittee shall receive submissions, judge them, and administer the awards.
The rules and procedures are announced in a timely issue of the Newsletter and on the ISCB annual conference webpage.
Report
After five years as Chair of the sub-committee (SC), Ulrich Mansmann resigned from this position, but remains as a member. In addition, Keith Abrams resigned from the SC after three years of service. On behalf of the ISCB, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ulrich for his efforts as Chair and Keith for his review service within the SC. Since August 2015, Nadine Binder is the succeeding SC-Chair and Katherine Lee the SC-secretary, both approved by President David W. Warne. It should further be noted, that the abbreviation of the SC changed from SCA to StCA, to avoid confusions with CAS (Conference Awards for Scientists) SC.
For the 2016 Annual Conference, we received 18 applications: 2 applicants came from Australia, Belgium, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom; 1 applicant came from Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, and The Netherlands. Reacting on last years’ accident that one application has not arrived in the Chair’s email inbox, this year, all applications were sent to both, the Chair and the Secretary. This was added to the application guidelines beforehand, and will be continued in the future.
The SC selected three students after a double-blind review of the submitted abstracts and summary papers from each applicant (listed below).
Name / Country / University / Title / Session
Agnieszka Król / France / Université de Bordeaux / The use of tumor dynamics and non-target lesions to predict survival with multivariate joint frailty models / C31
Christos Thomadakis / Greece / National and Kapodistrian University of Athens / Longitudinal and time-to-drop-out joint models can lead to seriously biased estimates when the drop-out mechanism is at random / C34
Nicole Erler / The Netherlands / Erasmus University Medical Center / Bayesian imputation of time-varying covariates in linear mixed models / C17
All members participated in the review process, and I would like to take the opportunity to thank the SC for judging the applications and for giving good care and deliberation in the decision process. Thanks also to the President David W. Warne for valuable comments. Specifically, in the decision process, new potential summary statistics were suggested and the option had been raised to further extend the scoring system. We will discuss and decide on this at the upcoming SC meeting.
In addition, the SC takes actions for making the annual conferences a stimulating place with good networking opportunities for all young researchers. We established a Young Researcher Get Together during the conference in 2013, which has continued since then. The 2015gathering (Sunday evening) was a good success. In short, (a) It was organized by the LOC in collaboration with the conference organizing bureau; (b) Conference participants who registered as 'student' in the registration system got the option the sign in for the student gathering; (c) Around 100 students attended; (d) Offered were three tickets for drinks and a free meal, sponsored by the Dutch Society for Statistics and Operations Research (1500 EUR, i.e., 15 EUR p.P.).The get together will take place at this years’ conference on Sunday, 21 August– thanks to the LOC for organisation.
We furthermore developed a new format for the 2016 conference: The Students’ Day, which will take place on Thursday, 25 August.The day is open for registration to recently graduated, ongoing or almost finished PhD students. The aim of the day is to stimulate discussion on how to shape a research career, e.g. on how to come up with competitive research projects. Three experienced biostatistical researchers are going to give career advice on strategies for success in biostatistical research. A total of 14 students, ranging from just starting to almost finishing their PhD, will share their ideas of doing good research and discuss research challenges they are facing by means of their research projects (contributions from open abstract submissions). Detailed information on the programme can be found on the conference website and in the conference abstract book. Registrations for the Student’s Day can be made through the conference registration system. Participation is free for delegates already registered for the conference, and costs £30 for students only attending the day. We are looking forward to a stimulating exchange of experiences.
The SC is going to convene on Monday, 22 August, 12:30-13:30, in Birmingham to discuss plans for 2017.

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