Two graduate students at HCP won research awards to attend the 12th International Conference on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS) held January 10-12, 2018. The conference is organized by the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association, and provides a forum for practitioners, health services researchers, and methodologists to discuss solutions to real-world health policy problems.

Savannah Bergquist is a PhD candidate in the health policy program pursuing dissertation research on systematically missing data and prediction. She received her travel award for the paper Intervening on the Data to Improve the Performance of Health Plan Payment Methods, which she will also present at the conference. Savannah’s work on this project is funded by her Harvard Graduate Society Research Fellowship and a Harvard Data Science Initiativecompetitive research fund grant awarded to her advisor Sherri Rose.

Christoph Kurz is a visiting doctoral researcher at Harvard and a student in the Medical Research PhD program at LMU Munich/Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany. His research focuses on economic evaluation and Bayesian statistics. Christoph’s award-winning paper is titled Bayesian Nonparametric Clustering and Inference for Inpatient Health Care Utilization, and will be presented in a session on costs and utilization. At HCP, Christoph is working on a number of projects, including new research on statistical learning for synthetic controls with Laura Hatfield and Sherri Rose.

Overall, HCP will have a strong presence at ICHPS, with faculty talks from Hatfield, Rose, and Alan Zaslavsky, as well as Jose Zubizarreta, who will also teach a workshop on causal inference methods. Students Kate Lofgren and Matt Brault will present their work, along with postdoctoral fellows Chenyang Gu and Sam Adhikari.