Transition Report
Ted Lystig (BIOP Chair, 2024) and Erik Bloomquist (BIOP Chair, 2025)
Highlights
Discover BIOP's impactful events from 2024 and exclusive preview of initiatives scheduled for 2025.
Explore the latest on BIOP awards, Scientific Working Groups, Leadership in Practice Committee developments, Statisticians in Small Biotech updates, Communications & Education initiatives, and key conferences.
Stay informed with the latest updates on BIOP finances and newly elected BIOP officers.
Dear BIOP Members and Friends,
We’d like to update you on BIOP happenings in 2024 and introduce some new initiatives the section has planned for 2025.
The year 2024 represented yet another highly successful Regulatory-Industry Statistics Workshop with record breaking attendance of 1,250 members. The workshop was chaired by Zhiheng Xu (FDA) and Jianchang Lin (Takeda) and included two very well received plenary sessions and 56 parallel sessions. A tribute to the life of Dionne Price, former ASA President and ASA BIOP Section chair was also held and chaired by Adrian Coles and Shanti Gomatam.
As usual, the Section held multiple meetings of the Executive Committee (EC) throughout the year. Our Spring and Fall 2024 EC meetings were each held virtually, while an in-person EC meeting and the annual BIOP mixer and business meeting were both held in-person at JSM in Portland.
One notable tragedy struck the section in 2024 with the passing of Meijing Wu in November. Meijing Wu was the BIOP report editor and incoming elected Communications Officer for the section. Meijing’s commitment to many BIOP committees and activities has left a lasting impact on many members of the section, and she will be fondly remembered . To honor her legacy, the BIOP community established a memory page in early 2025, with donations earmarked to support BIOP award initiatives.
In the subsequent sections, we address the activity and impact of the Section throughout 2024, and we also take a sneak peek at 2025.
Awards
The designation of awards is a long-standing and significant way the Section provides service to the profession, encouraging leading-edge science by students and professional statisticians at all career levels. Our awards include the BIOP Student Scholarship Award, along with several presentation and paper awards linked to JSM and various other conferences.
The BIOP Student Scholarship Award Committee fielded yet another record number of applications in 2024, and included 10 winners. Consideration for the awards is based primarily on notable academic achievement or applied project work related to the area of biopharmaceutical statistics, general academic performance, leadership, service/volunteering, and diversity. As a result of the large number of deserving, high-quality applicants, the committee awarded ten scholarships, rather than the traditional five scholarships. Recipients were recognized during the JSM Business Meeting and Mixer and via our social media channels. The 2024 recipients were:
Navneet Ram Hakhu (University of California, Irvine)
Ann Marie Weideman (University of North Carolina)
Ransmond Berchie (University of Utah)
Megan McCabe (University of Iowa)
Yixin (Amy) Zhang (Boston University)
Runjia Li (University of Pittsburgh)
Dennis Baidoo (University of New Mexico)
Marlena Bannick (University of Washington)
Lizhao Ge (George Washington University)
Zhongyang Ma (New York University)
Thank you to Wenting Cheng (2024 Chair of the Scholarship Award Committee), Bruce Binkowitz, Rebbecca Wilson, and Tony Jiang for stewarding the selection process.
Also recognized at the JSM Business Meeting and Mixer were the Student Paper Awards and Best Contributed Poster Awards. The 2024 Student Paper awardees were:
First place: Kai Chen (UT Health, Houston)
Second place: Chang Wang (University of Michigan)
Third place: Edward Bi (University of Chicago)
Honorary Mentions: Jack Wolf (University of Minnesota), James Willard (McGill University), Qingzhi Liu (University of Michigan), Marlena Bannick (University of Washington), Xue Yang (University of Pittsburgh)
Thank you to Lanju Zhang (Chair of the committee), Yang Chen, Yu Du, Siddesh Kulkarni, Ruitao Lin, Jimin Wu, Meijing Wu, Yunlong Yang for their work in stewarding the award selection process.
The winners of the 2024 Best Contributed Poster Award were:
First place: Xutong Zhao, Jing Sun, and Dalong Huang.
Second place: Yuting Xu, Kevin Stone, Melodie Christensen, Ajit Vikram, Kobi Felton, Kaitlyn Brinza, Spencer McMinn, Victor Schultz, Shane Grosser
Third place: Dan Jackson, Fanni Zhang , Carl-Fredrik Burman, Linda Sharples
Honorary Mention: Akari Naito, Kei Fujikawa, Go Horiguchi, Mitsuko Nakata, Satoshi Teramukai
Thank you to Yilong Zhang and the entire Best Contributed Poster committee for helping to make this poster award happen in 2024!
Scientific Working Groups
In accordance with the BIOP Sections process for establishing new SWG’s, in 2024, three new SWG’s were established, bringing the total number of SWG’s to 19. The new SWG’s and their chairs are listed below:
Randomization Working Group—Alex Sverdlov
Metabolic Diseases Working Group—Hiya Banerjee, Jingyi Liu
Neuroscience Working Group—Mandy Jin
Thank you to Brian Waterhouse (committee Chair) and Yodit Seifu for their exemplary efforts in shepherding the SWG proposal process for BIOP.
Leadership in Practice Committee (LiPCom) [Richard Zink, Chair]
LiPCom had an active 2024, with presentations at ENAR, JSM, NIC/ISCA, RISW, SIP. Several webinars were provided and a local LiPCom-sponsored Workshop in Applied Improvisation in Leadership and Communication was held in Raleigh. 2025 looks to have several additional leadership opportunities as well with courses at DISS, ICSA, JSM, and SIP! Thanks to Veronica Bubb, Emily Butler, Andy Chi, Abie Ekangaki, Rakhi Kilaru, Qing Li, Lisa Lupinacci, Yabing Mai, Shanti Sethuraman, Vincent Tan, and Hongwei Wang. Your efforts have brought practical, leadership-focused content to the BIOP community.
Statisticians in Small Biotech committee [Wei (Michelle) Zhang, chair]
The Statisticians in Small Biotech Committee has been actively working on initiatives to strengthen engagement and provide valuable resources for our community.
Some key updates & initiatives include
Webpage Enhancements – We updated our mission statement and refining website content to better serve our members.
Improved Membership Access – The "Join" process is being streamlined to make it easier for statisticians to connect and participate.
ASA Community Platform – We have established an ASA community where statisticians in small biotech companies can exchange ideas, share experiences, and discuss best practices through the ASA Community discussion forum.
Recruitment Strategy – Our team is actively brainstorming strategies to attract new members and increase participation in our community.
Resource Development – In 2024, we remain committed to building our website and online community into a valuable resource for statisticians in small biotech and beyond.
JSM 2024 Biopharmaceutical Section Panel Discussion – We organized a panel discussion titled "Don’t Go It Alone" at JSM 2024, where experts shared insights on navigating careers in small biotech.
Upcoming RISW 2025 Event – We are organizing an in-person session at RISW 2025 to promote networking, collaboration, and professional development.
A special thank you to our dedicated team members for their contributions:
Alan Hartford, Mohamed Hamdani, Sharon Murray, Jingtao Wu, Ruixiao Lu, Alan Chiang and Liang Fang. We look forward to continuing to grow this community and support statisticians in small biotech!
Communications & Education
Thank you to Herb Pang for leading the active BIOP Distance Learning Committee webinar series in 2024. The series features diverse speakers from industry, academia, and the FDA, covering topics from open-source software in regulatory submissions to the use of AI/ML in drug development. Other engaging topics include real-world evidence, statistical leadership, patient-reported outcomes, and health technology assessment. Participation/viewing of webinars is free for all BIOP members. So Young Park and Arunava Chakravartty have begun to organize webinars for 2025. You can view information on past webinars here (https://community.amstat.org/biop/media-contents/webinararchive).
Further details will be announced on our discussion forums about a month ahead of each event.
Finally, thank you to Hiya Banerjee who manages BIOP’s social media presence. News of BIOP activities is actively shared on LinkedIn and X (formerly known as twitter). Traffic to these postings is strong and continues to grow, thanks to her continuous efforts to curate content in partnership with the EC and committee members.
JSM 2024
In 2024, BIOP sponsored five invited sessions. This includes our four allocated sessions plus one additional session earned through competition. In addition to the invited sessions, BIOP sponsored 16 topic-contributed sessions, 20 contributed paper sessions (containing 7 presentations each, which includes a designated session for the winners of the ASA BIOP Student Paper Competition), 37 contributed poster presentations, and 15 contributed speed presentations. In addition, a total of 4 continuous education short courses were sponsored by the Biopharmaceutical Section at JSM.
Thank you to Bo Huang (BIOP Program Chair) for driving the selection process for BIOP in 2024.
RISW 2024
The 2024 ASA Biopharmaceutical Section Regulatory-Industry Statistics Workshop (RISW) was held in North Bethesda, MD from September 25-27 and once again resulted in a highly successful event. The workshop had a theme of “Harnessing the Power of Statistics, Data Science, and Digital Technology to Drive Patient-Focused Innovations Together” and featured over 1, 200 statisticians and researchers participating in 10 short courses, 56 parallel sessions, and 2 plenary sessions that focused on the intersection of statistics, data science and AI in drug development and regulations.
For a full recap of the event including summaries of many of the sessions, please visit: https://asabiopreport.substack.com/p/2024-risw-special-issue?r=4o7pco&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
Thank you to 2024 RISW co-chairs Zhiheng Xu and Jianchang Lin for your great efforts in making this happen.
Finance and Sponsorship
We are happy to report a strong end-of-year balance for BIOP of $543,000. As a Section of a nonprofit organization, our goal is to deploy resources in service of our membership and the profession in a responsible and sustainable manner. Our current position provides an ideal opportunity to proactively evaluate financial standing going forward, in light of aggregate environmental changes over the past four years.
In addition to strong financial position, the section funded and sponsored 5 external conferences with $12,000 of support. BIOP looks forward to 2025 and continued support of the statistical profession and our members.
BIOP Newly Elected Officers
BIOP welcomes four new elected officers for 2024 and two new at large members including our section chair-elect, Steve Novick from Takeda, program Chair-elect Inna Perevoskaya from BMS, Council of Sections Rep Jennifer Gauvin from Novartis and the late-Meijing Wu for Publications officer. Our two new executive council at-large members are Matt Psioda from GSK and Justine Rochon from Boehringer Ingelheim.
2025 Sneak Peek
Following a successful 2024, our Section is thriving with a healthily engaged membership, established programs that provide value to the members and our profession, and several recent, emerging initiatives, committees, and working groups aimed at further increasing our impact in the future. Our slate of officers and other volunteers bring a mindset of innovation and improvement to the business of the Section which is refreshing. From a financial perspective, we are in really strong standing with an end-of-year balance of over $500,000.
A new award in 2025 will be launched supporting student travel to the Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference held annually in the Fall. The section has been working on this award for several years and is looking forward to supporting young professionals attending this conference.
As we close this message, we want to thank all volunteers (officers and committee members and SWG members) who keep this very active section running. Your work is impactful and enormously appreciated. As we look ahead, we want to hear from you. Your ideas, suggestions, and feedback are essential in shaping BIOP into an even more relevant, inclusive, and impactful community for statisticians in our industry. Together, we can ensure our section remains a strong and vibrant home for years to come.
With Best Regards,
Erik and Ted