The investigator and his colleagues will organize and conduct a Summer Research Conference (SRC) in statistics and biostatistics at Jekyll Island, Georgia June 3-6, 2012. The SRC is an annual conference sponsored by the Southern Regional Council on Statistics (SRCOS). Its purpose is to encourage the interchange and mutual understanding of current research ideas in statistics and biostatistics, and to give motivation and direction to further research progress. The project will focus on young researchers, placing them in close proximity to leaders in the field for person-to-person interactions in a manner not possible at most other meetings; these leaders, if from the southern region, pay their own way and contribute their time. Speakers will present formal research talks with adequate time allowed for clarification, amplification, and further informal discussions in small groups. Under the travel support provided by this award students and young faculty who do not have financial support for their travel will attend and also present posters to be reviewed by more experienced researchers.
The Southern Regional Council on Statistics is a consortium of statistics and biostatistics programs in the South, stretching as far west as Texas and as far north as Maryland. It currently has 43 member programs at 39 universities in 16 states in the region. This project will fund student and young-investigator travel to the 2012 Summer Research Conference (SRC) sponsored by SRCOS; see www.sph.emory.edu/srcos/research.htm for an archive of many recent SRCs. The meeting is particularly valuable for students and faculty from smaller regional schools at drivable distances, affording them the opportunity to participate and interact closely with internationally-known leaders in the field without the cost of travel to distant national or international venues. It will strengthen the research of the statistics and biostatistics community as a whole, and particularly in the underdeveloped southern region.
NSF Award ID 1157813 PI: Don Edwards, University of South Carolina (2012-13 President, SRCoS) Ninety-two scholars attended the 48th Summer Research Conference (SRC), June 3-6 2012 in Jekyll Island, Georgia, organized by the Southern Regional Council on Statistics (SRCoS) and hosted by Emory University. The website for the meeting is www.sph.emory.edu/srcos2012 and contains all program details, manuscripts or pdfs of slide presentations, and photos and videos of conference activities. The program was anchored by two internationally-renowned plenary speakers from outside the southern region: Rod Little (University of Michigan and US Census Bureau) and Xiao-Li Meng (Harvard), with discussants Lance Waller (Emory) and Hao Helen Zhang (NC State) respectively. Five other invited oral presentation sessions featured senior faculty speakers, including banquet speaker Montserrat Fuentes of NC State, as well as outstanding junior faculty invited speakers. Thirty-six students representing fourteen graduate programs received NSF travel awards to support or partially support their travel to the meeting and participation in the RL Anderson student poster session. The average NSF travel award was $278, totaling $10,000 in NSF support. These travel awards enabled students, in many cases representing programs with limited travel budgets, to experience a real scientific conference. They interacted closely with leading researchers in the field in a manner which would not be possible at larger national or international meetings, which would also be prohibitively expensive for many of these students to attend. A distinguished panel of judges comprised of Jane Harvill (Baylor, chair), D’Arcy Mays (VCU), Xiao-Li Meng (Harvard), and Edsel Peña (South Carolina) awarded the M. Clinton Miller award for best student poster to Kristin Linn of NC State University. RL Anderson (runner-up) student poster awards went to Wenhui Sheng of Georgia and Huybrechts Bindele of Auburn.
