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
Bethany Bengs	Integrated Digital Twin Approach for Comprehensive Alzheimer's Patient Characterization