Congratulations to Statistics Ph.D. students Xu Gao and Maricela Cruz who both recently received best paper awards from the American Statistical Association (ASA). Gao was recognized for his paper, “Evolving State-Space Models with Applications to Local Field Potentials.” Cruz was recognized for her paper on healthcare data titled, “A robust interrupted time series model for analyzing complex healthcare intervention data.” They will have the opportunity to present their papers at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2017) in August 2017.

Gao recently won the Eastern North American Region (ENAR) International Biometrics Society’s Distinguished Student Paper Award competition in January 2017., while Cruz is a fellow of the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRF).