PhD student Lee receives ASA SIE 2024 Early Career Award

PhD candidate Sang Kyu Lee, from the MSU Department of Statistics and Probability, was honored with the 2024 Early Career Award by the Section on Statistics in Epidemiology (SIE) of the American Statistical Association (ASA). This annual award recognizes new researchers for presenting the most outstanding papers in the field of statistics in epidemiology at the Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM). His awarded paper, titled "Decomposition of the Longitudinal Disparities: An Application to the Fetal Growth-Singletons Study," showcases significant contributions to the field. Sang Kyu Lee is under the co-advisement of Dr. Hyokyoung (Grace) Hong and Dr. Haolei Weng. He is currently fulfilling dual roles, serving as a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University (MSU) and as a pre-doc fellow at the Biostatistics Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“It's a great honor for me to be the recipient of the paper award from ASA. I sincerely thank the award committee members for their kind consideration,” said Lee. “Additionally, I extend my deepest appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Hong, and my fellow collaborators for their substantial support and encouragement during this research. In our study, we introduced a new decomposition framework. This framework was designed to tackle two key issues: firstly, the potential decrease in disparity if minority groups' covariate distributions were aligned with those of the majority group, and secondly, the dynamic nature of disparity. This was achieved by employing a varying-coefficient model that not only tracks the longitudinal changes of disparity but also addresses the complex interactions among exploratory variables.”

Dr. Hyokyoung (Grace) Hong, formerly an associate professor at STT and now a senior investigator at the NIH Intramural Program, a role equivalent to that of a full professor, voices her enthusiasm about Sang Kyu Lee's recent distinction from the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Epidemiology (SIE): “Seeing Sang Kyu Lee honored with such a prestigious award brings me great joy,” she stated.  “Sang Kyu's significant contribution in developing an advanced statistical model to decompose and understand the disparities in fetal growth over time across various racial groups has rightfully received recognition. This approach paves the way for in-depth analysis of disparities in evolving scenarios, a challenging aspect that has not seen much exploration,” she remarked, underscoring Lee's profound impact on the field.

Lee plans to present this work during the upcoming conference, Joint Statistical Meeting 2024, (August 3-8, 2024) in Portland, Oregon. 

For additional information about this award: https://community.amstat.org/sie/awards.