Angela Dahl, a Biostatistics PhD student at the University of Washington, was awarded the 2025 Outstanding Written Student Paper Award by the Western North American Region (WNAR) of The International Biometric Society.
Her paper, “A Bayesian joint longitudinal-survival model in calendar time for epidemic settings,” outlines a new method for vaccine studies that take place during an epidemic when the risk of infection can change rapidly.
“Prior to this work, no method existed for jointly modeling longitudinal data (such as antibody levels) with a survival outcome (such as SARS-CoV-2 infection) that depends on calendar time,” said Dahl.
“Our method incorporates external epidemic curve data to inform the risk of exposure to infection over time. This allows us to estimate the effect of waning antibody levels on infection risk while accounting for fluctuations in the epidemic curve—are vaccine-elicited antibodies not very protective, or is the epidemic surging? Our method helps disentangle this question.”
Dahl and other student award winners were honored at a banquet at the 2025 WNAR Annual Meeting held in June in Whistler, British Columbia. All WNAR participants received travel awards, and winners received additional monetary awards and certificates.
