In September 2023, Guoqing Diao, Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Milken Institute SPH, and collaborators received the prestigious Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA), for the "depth, breadth, and statistical rigor of their collaboration and its impact on the conduct of clinical trials.” Diao's collaborators included researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), the University of Connecticut, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Merck.
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 this year’s SPAIG 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 has led multiple projects on drug safety signal detection and missing data problems over the last ten years. 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). The team’s work continues to push the boundaries of biostatistics, with significant implications for the future of clinical research.