Edward Kennedy, associate professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science, will receive the聽聽for his outstanding contributions to public health and statistics.
鈥淎 lot of my stats heroes have won this award in the past,鈥� said Kennedy. 鈥淚t is a great honor.鈥�
Kennedy applies his expertise to work beyond correlations and associations in data to understand the underlying cause that leads to the effect. These statistical techniques are already making critical advances in health care.
In his work, Kennedy focuses on the statistical theory to build the tools that can be applied by himself and other scientists to a host of health, public policy and other research questions.
This approach is particularly beneficial to health science, because many questions raised by the field, such as the efficacy of a new treatment or therapy, cannot be studied as a traditional randomized experiment. Large studies, such as clinical trials, hinge on a collection of observational data that must be evaluated to understand why the outcomes in both the treatment group and the group receiving standard care. To make inroads in developing new treatments, researchers must develop strong and definitive conclusions using this data, and Kennedy鈥檚 statistical approaches move the field forward in these efforts.
To date, Kennedy鈥檚 work has been applied to studies that explored , the , the impact of , the , admission patterns in the VA health care system, and improved cardiovascular risk predictions using electronic healthcare records.
Kennedy will receive his award at the annual Applied Public Health Statistics meeting Oct. 27鈥�30 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. This honor is bestowed annually by the APHA to a statistician under 40 who is advancing the field of health statistics, particularly public health statistics.