NISS Graduate Student Network Research Conference 2024

The NISS Graduate Student Network (GSN) is very excited to once again announce our 4^th annual two-day Graduate Student Network Research Conference. Last year's conference in 2023 was a resounding success with many fantastic presentations and selecting winners was quite a challenge! This year's conference will be a two-day event and take place on Saturday, May 18 and Sunday, May 19, 2024, from 12pm - 5 pm ET each day.

Career Panels:

• Statistical Careers in Academia
• Statistical Careers in Industry and Government

The GSN Research Conference will feature graduate student presentations and two keynote speakers on Day 1. During the conference, 4 graduate students will be recognized with the best presentation awards based on the content and the quality of their presentation.

Keynote Speakers:

• Miguel Hernán, Harvard University
• Razieh Nabi, Emory University

Register on Eventbrite

Call for Abstracts

Submit an abstract to participate in the graduate student research conference as a presenter! 

Submit Your Abstract

Graduate Student Presentations

Students will present either an oral presentation or a poster presentation at this conference within the following categories:

• Original Research (their own research work),
• Literature Research (presentation of a published paper that is not authored by the presenter), or
• Literature Review (presentation on recent developments in an area -- this would be a chance to present a couple of papers to highlight recent developments in an area of interest.)

Selected oral presentations will involve a 20 minute live presentation including 5 minutes of Q&A.

About Speakers

Miguel Hernán uses health data and causal inference methods to learn what works. As Director of the CAUSALab at Harvard, he and his collaborators repurpose real world data into scientific evidence for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental illness. This work has shaped health policy and research methodology worldwide. Miguel is co-director of the Laboratory for Early Psychosis (LEAP) Center, principal investigator of the HIV-CAUSAL Collaboration, and co-director of the VA-CAUSAL Methods Core, an initiative of the U.S. Veterans Health Administration to integrate high-quality data and explicitly causal methodologies in a nationwide learning health system. As the Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, he teaches at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he has mentored dozens of trainees and students, and at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His free online course “Causal Diagrams” and book “Causal Inference: What If”, co-authored with James Robins, are widely used for the training of researchers. Miguel has received many awards for his work, including the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, the Rothman Epidemiology Prize, and a MERIT award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Statistical Association, Associate Editor of Annals of Internal Medicine, Editor Emeritus of Epidemiology, and past Associate Editor of Biometrics, American Journal of Epidemiology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. He often serves on committees of the U.S. National Academies.”

Razieh  Nabi graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 2021 with a PhD in Computer Science, subsequently joining Emory University where she is currently a Rollins Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, with a secondary appointment in Computer Science. Dr. Nabi’s research is at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and public health, where she focuses on developing innovative causal inference methodologies. Her work tackles critical challenges such as unmeasured confounders in observational studies, the curse of dimensionality, and biases in data—especially informative missing and censored data, and  those reflecting historical patterns of discrimination and inequality. Her methodologies have profound implications across various fields including social justice, public policy, and healthcare research.