Guoqing Diao, Ph.D., Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, and collaborators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), University of Connecticut, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Merck, received the prestigious Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award awarded by the American Statistical Association (ASA), for the "depth, breadth, and statistical rigor of their collaboration and its impact on the conduct of clinical trials.”
The SPAIG Award was established in 2002 to recognize outstanding partnerships between academia, industry, and government organizations, and to promote new partnerships among these organizations. The partnership awarded the SPAIG this year was founded in 2009 by Joseph Ibrahim (UNC), the late Joseph Heyse (Merck), Arvind Shah (Merck), and the late Frank (Guanghan) Liu (Merck) and has led to the development of many novel statistical methodologies that are motivated by real biopharmaceutical studies and high-impact publications in top-tier biostatistical/biopharmaceutical journals. As a key contributor, Diao joined this effort ten years ago and led multiple projects on drug safety signal detection and missing data problems. Diao presented the work on multiple imputation methods for sensitivity analysis of recurrent event data with informative censoring at the 2023 Joint Statistical Meetings (August 5 – August 10) in memory of Frank Liu.