19th Annual Innovations in Design, Analysis, and Dissemination: Frontiers in Biostatistics & Data Science Meeting

Sponsors:The University of Kansas Medical Center Department of Biostatistics & Data Science, Kansas Western-Missouri Chapter of the American Statistical Association, University of Kansas Cancer Center, Quantitative Omics Core that supports the Kansas Institute for Precision Medicine, K-INBRE, and EMB Statistical Solutions, LLC.

Program at a glance:

Day 1 Program
Monday, April 20th 2026
12:30p - 1:00p Arrival
1:00p - 1:10p Welcome and opening remarks
1:10p - 2:00p Distinguished Lecture: Lucy D'Agostino McGowan, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor, Department of Statistical Sciences, Wake Forest University
Title: The Role of Congeniality in Multiple Imputation for Doubly Robust Causal Estimation
2:00p - 2:15p Break
2:15p - 3:30p Invited/Contributed Presentations:
  • Invited Speaker: Josefina Lacasa, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, Kansas State University,
    Title: Leveraging Data from Extension Programs to Address Research Questions - Opportunities and Challenges
  • Contributed Speaker: Kyle Shindl, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
    Title: Distributional Discontinuity Design
  • Invited Speaker: Hui Liu, M.S., Assistant Instructor, Department of Computer Science and Cybersecurity, University of Central Missouri
    Title: From Code to Care: The Clinical Translation of AI
3:30p - 3:45p Break
3:45p - 5:00p Invited/Contributed Presentations:
  • Invited Speaker: Xing Song, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics and Medical Epidemiology
    Title: Real World Data Affordance: Prediction, Exploration and Causation
  • Contributed Speaker: Mai Dao, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics, Wichita State University
    Title: High-Dimensional Cox Model with the Horseshoe Prior
  • Invited Speaker: Sreejata Dutta, Ph.D.,Biostatistician, Research & Statistics Children’s Hospital Association Title: Data with Heart: Why Children's Hospitals Are a Statistician's Happy Place
5:00p - 5:10p Day 1 wrap up

Day 2 Program
Tuesday, April 21st 2026
7:30a - 8:00a Arrival
8:00a - 12:00a Short Course:Frailty Models in Survival Analysis
  • Speaker: Milind Phadnis, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics & Data Science, University of Kansas Medical Center
12:00p - 1:00p Lunch
1:00p - 2:30p Poster and networking session
2:30p - 3:00p Prep and arrival for Dionne Price Public Lecture
3:00p - 4:30p Dionne Price Public Lecture:
Lorin Crawford, Ph.D., Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research,
Title: A Statistician's Roadmap Toward an AI-Driven Paradigm for Precision Oncology
04:30p - 06:00p ASA Reception



Poster presentations:

Presenter Abstract Title
Bethany Bengs Digital Siblings Unveil Distinct Molecular and Clinical Subtypes in Alzheimer's Disease via Omics-Driven Profiling
Evan Becker The Use of Riemann Sampling with Adaptive Binning to Estimate Posterior Distributions in Bayesian Statistics
Mengyan Jing Bayesian Spatial Additive Regression Using Lancaster-Šalkauskas Natural Cubic Spline Basis Functions and Matérn Gaussian Processes
Geethanjalee Mudunkotuwa Design of non-inferiority clinical trials for survival outcomes in scenarios with  non-proportional hazards using the concept of Relative Time
Olivia Delmas Identifying Molecular Pathways Differentiating Interstitial Lung Diseases
Bethany Bengs Integrated Digital Twin Approach for Comprehensive Alzheimer's Patient Characterization
Derrick Asante Nutrition Literacy Among Head and Neck Cancer Survivor and Care Partner Dyads
Mohammod Mahmudur Rahman Predictor-based Bayesian adaptive design for phase II clinical trials with time-to-event endpoints under non-proportional hazards
Sauda Mubarak Multi-omics integration of tissue transcriptomes and proteomes enhances drug target prioritization
Md Rezaul Kader New Statistical Methods for Assessing the Operating Characteristics of Non-Monotone Biomarkers
Jarrad Botchway Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression: Integrating Heterogeneous Transcriptomic Studies for Robust Biological Inference
MD Atikur Rahman Privacy-Preserving Federated ADMM for High-dimensional Multicenter Genomics Analysis 
Oluwatobiloba Ige Using the Free Energy Principle to Improve How AI Models Adapt to New Breast Cancer Scanners
Oluwatobiloba Ige Racial, Ethnic, and Demographic Disparities in Oncology Clinical Trial Enrollment at the University of Kansas Cancer Center (2018-2024)
Md Robiul Islam Talukder Sample Size Calculation for Two-Arm Time-to-Event Trials Under Nonproportional Hazards with Patient-Level Heterogeneity
Pathum Randunu Nawarathna Kandedura Arachchige Genetic analysis of triplicated genes affecting sex-specific skeletal deficits in Down syndrome model mice
Kwame Yeboah 3D Reconstruction of Amyloid-Beta Plaques from Serial Histological Sections
Naima Alam Optimizing Combination Therapies Using a Bayesian Adaptive Design with a Two-dimensional NDLM
Foyez Ahmmed A generalized ROC framework on R^2 for biomarker combinations.
Michael Kuehn Novel truncation variants expand the role of SPECC1L in neurodevelopmental disorders
Stephan Komladzei Sparse Network-Guided Quadratic Discriminant Analysis for High-Dimensional Data
Barsha Halder Deep Learning Framework for Temporal-Data Imputation in Longitudinal Electronic Health Records:Sequence-to-Sequence with Multi-Head Cross-Attention
Abhisek Banerjee Beyond Hazard Models: Neural Conditional Quantile Learning for Right-Censored Survival Data
Clayton Mansel A favorable lifestyle profile nearly completely mitigates polygenic risk for Alzheimer's Disease and related dementias
Nivedita Selvaraj Bayesian Estimation of Mortality Risk in Heart Failure Patients
Devin Bog Systems analysis of prefrontal cortex in Prader-Willi syndrome reveals signatures of neuroinflammation and class-specific disruptions in neurotransmission
Md Tamzid Islam Inference and Comparison of ROC Curves via Yeo-Johnson Transformation for Single and Correlated Biomarkers
Brileigh Cates Analyzing Sleep Architecture and Brain State Transitions via Hidden Markov Models on fMRI Data


Last modified: April 8, 2026

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Evan Becker The Use of Riemann Sampling with Adaptive Binning to Estimate Posterior Distributions in Bayesian Statistics Mengyan Jing Bayesian Spatial Additive Regression Using Lancaster-Šalkauskas Natural Cubic Spline Basis Functions and Matérn Gaussian Processes Geethanjalee Mudunkotuwa Design of non-inferiority clinical trials for


survival outcomes in scenarios with


non-proportional hazards using the concept of Relative Time Olivia Delmas Identifying Molecular Pathways Differentiating Interstitial Lung Diseases Derrick  Asante Nutrition Literacy Among Head and Neck Cancer Survivor and Care Partner Dyads Mohammod Mahmudur Rahman Predictor-based Bayesian adaptive design for phase II clinical trials with time-to-event endpoints under non-proportional hazards Sauda Mubarak Multi-omics integration of tissue transcriptomes and proteomes enhances drug target prioritization Md Rezaul Kader New Statistical Methods for Assessing the Operating Characteristics of Non-Monotone Biomarkers Jarrad Botchway Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression: Integrating Heterogeneous Transcriptomic Studies for Robust Biological Inference MD Atikur Rahman Privacy-Preserving Federated ADMM for High-dimensional Multicenter Genomics Analysis Oluwatobiloba Ige Using the Free Energy Principle to Improve How AI Models Adapt to New Breast Cancer Scanners Oluwatobiloba Ige Racial, Ethnic, and Demographic Disparities in Oncology Clinical Trial Enrollment at the University of Kansas Cancer Center (2018-2024) Md Robiul Islam Talukder Sample Size Calculation for Two-Arm Time-to-Event Trials Under Nonproportional Hazards with Patient-Level Heterogeneity Minh Tran Accelerating the calculation of patient comorbidity scores from ICD-10 codes using parallel computing in R Kwame Yeboah 3D Reconstruction of Amyloid-Beta Plaques from Serial Histological Sections Naima Alam Optimizing Combination Therapies Using a Bayesian Adaptive Design with a Two-dimensional NDLM Foyez Ahmmed A generalized ROC framework on R^2  for biomarker combinations. Michael Kuehn Novel truncation variants expand the role of SPECC1L in neurodevelopmental disorders Stephan Komladzei Sparse Network-Guided Quadratic Discriminant Analysis for High-Dimensional Data. Barsha Halder Deep Learning Framework for Temporal-Data Imputation in Longitudinal Electronic Health Records: Sequence-to-Sequence with Multi-Head Cross-Attention Abhisek Banerjee Beyond Hazard Models: Neural Conditional Quantile Learning for Right-Censored Survival Data Clayton Mansel A favorable lifestyle profile nearly completely mitigates polygenic risk for Alzheimer's Disease and related dementias Nivedita Selvaraj Bayesian Estimation of Mortality Risk in Heart Failure Patients Devin Bog Systems analysis of prefrontal cortex in Prader-Willi syndrome reveals signatures of neuroinflammation and class-specific disruptions in neurotransmission Md Tamzid Islam Inference and Comparison of ROC Curves via Yeo-Johnson Transformation for Single and Correlated Biomarkers

Evan Becker The Use of Riemann Sampling with Adaptive Binning to Estimate Posterior Distributions in Bayesian Statistics Mengyan Jing Bayesian Spatial Additive Regression Using Lancaster-Šalkauskas Natural Cubic Spline Basis Functions and Matérn Gaussian Processes Geethanjalee Mudunkotuwa Design of non-inferiority clinical trials for


survival outcomes in scenarios with


non-proportional hazards using the concept of Relative Time Olivia Delmas Identifying Molecular Pathways Differentiating Interstitial Lung Diseases Derrick  Asante Nutrition Literacy Among Head and Neck Cancer Survivor and Care Partner Dyads Mohammod Mahmudur Rahman Predictor-based Bayesian adaptive design for phase II clinical trials with time-to-event endpoints under non-proportional hazards Sauda Mubarak Multi-omics integration of tissue transcriptomes and proteomes enhances drug target prioritization Md Rezaul Kader New Statistical Methods for Assessing the Operating Characteristics of Non-Monotone Biomarkers Jarrad Botchway Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression: Integrating Heterogeneous Transcriptomic Studies for Robust Biological Inference MD Atikur Rahman Privacy-Preserving Federated ADMM for High-dimensional Multicenter Genomics Analysis Oluwatobiloba Ige Using the Free Energy Principle to Improve How AI Models Adapt to New Breast Cancer Scanners Oluwatobiloba Ige Racial, Ethnic, and Demographic Disparities in Oncology Clinical Trial Enrollment at the University of Kansas Cancer Center (2018-2024) Md Robiul Islam Talukder Sample Size Calculation for Two-Arm Time-to-Event Trials Under Nonproportional Hazards with Patient-Level Heterogeneity Minh Tran Accelerating the calculation of patient comorbidity scores from ICD-10 codes using parallel computing in R Kwame Yeboah 3D Reconstruction of Amyloid-Beta Plaques from Serial Histological Sections Naima Alam Optimizing Combination Therapies Using a Bayesian Adaptive Design with a Two-dimensional NDLM Foyez Ahmmed A generalized ROC framework on R^2  for biomarker combinations. Michael Kuehn Novel truncation variants expand the role of SPECC1L in neurodevelopmental disorders Stephan Komladzei Sparse Network-Guided Quadratic Discriminant Analysis for High-Dimensional Data. Barsha Halder Deep Learning Framework for Temporal-Data Imputation in Longitudinal Electronic Health Records: Sequence-to-Sequence with Multi-Head Cross-Attention Abhisek Banerjee Beyond Hazard Models: Neural Conditional Quantile Learning for Right-Censored Survival Data Clayton Mansel A favorable lifestyle profile nearly completely mitigates polygenic risk for Alzheimer's Disease and related dementias Nivedita Selvaraj Bayesian Estimation of Mortality Risk in Heart Failure Patients Devin Bog Systems analysis of prefrontal cortex in Prader-Willi syndrome reveals signatures of neuroinflammation and class-specific disruptions in neurotransmission Md Tamzid Islam Inference and Comparison of ROC Curves via Yeo-Johnson Transformation for Single and Correlated Biomarkers

Mengyan Jing

Olivia Delmas