Student Prize Paper Award

The Tyroler Prize Paper Award is given to recognize the best submitted paper by a student in a doctoral program with a concentration in epidemiology. The Tyroler Award honors Herman Alfred (Al) Tyroler, MD. The award is sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Eligibility

1. Paper must have been written as part of the applicant’s doctoral training in the 2 years leading up to the June meeting

2. Paper can be submitted, accepted, or published at the time of submission; papers published prior to submission should have been published no more than 6 months prior to the award submission deadline. The applicant need not be a doctoral student at the time of submission. No prize will be awarded if the review committee decides that no manuscript is of superior quality.

Requirements

Authors must include two documents:

1. Cover page with their name, telephone number, address and current position, a statement indicating the date the work was completed, their academic doctoral advisor’s name and signature to certify that the work was completed while the submitter was a doctoral student, and the name of their department chair or head

2. Manuscript, including a title page without name and affiliation. For under review, in press or already published papers, please submit the version of the paper that was submitted to the journal PRIOR TO PEER REVIEW and before typesetting by the journal. The paper should not contain any identifying information about the journal it was/will be published in.

Award Details

The award winner will receive complimentary meeting registration to SER’s Annual meeting, travel funds reimbursement up to the amount of $5,000, and be invited to give a scientific presentation at the Annual Meeting.

Herman Alfred (Al) Tyroler, MD, was a world-renowned cardiovascular disease epidemiologist. He was one of the primary scientists involved in developing collaborations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on cardiovascular disease studies. He also was involved in the original proposal to conduct the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences in 1980. Dr. Tyroler’s distinguished career at UNC spanned more than 40 years and established his reputation as an innovative scientist, a leader in public health, and a dedicated educator and mentor to numerous students and colleagues. Dr. Tyroler is remembered with affection and gratitude as a lifelong learner and a brilliant teacher who shaped the lives of those with whom he worked.

Previous Award Winners

2025

Adoma Manful
Adoma Manful is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at Vanderbilt University. Her research applies epidemiologic methods and data-driven approaches to investigate health conditions and inform policies that promote high-quality, equitable healthcare for all. With a background in clinical data analysis and health services research, she is committed to mitigating health disparities and improving health outcomes by addressing socio-contextual determinants of health. Her current work focuses on statistical approaches to lung cancer risk prediction with the goal of enhancing equity in screening eligibility. Through this research, she aims to contribute meaningful evidence to support national policy efforts to improve the fairness and effectiveness of lung cancer screening guidelines.

2024

Julia Bond
Julia Bond received her PhD in Epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health in 2024. Her dissertation research, supported by an F31 grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, evaluated preconception risk factors for adverse reproductive health outcomes. She is interested in incorporating sex-positive outcomes including pleasure and satisfaction into the epidemiologic study of sexual health. She obtained an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Washington and a BA in Neuroscience from Bowdoin College.

2023

Emma Herbach
Emma Herbach is an Assistant Scientist at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Office of Community Outreach and Engagement and Postdoctoral Scholar in the Cancer Control Training in Disparities and Equity program at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She completed her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Iowa in 2022. She earned a master’s degree in biostatistics in 2018 and bachelor’s degree in statistics and psychology in 2017 from Florida State University.

2022

Julie M. Petersen
Julie M. Petersen received her PhD in Epidemiology from the Boston University School of Public Health in 2021 and is currently a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Her research aims to inform clinical guidelines for pregnancy (e.g., birth spacing, diet and vitamin supplementation, weight gain) to prevent adverse pregnancy outcomes like congenital malformations, fetal growth restriction, and preterm birth. Her methodological interests include the relative benefit of novel methodologies, such as machine learning, versus conventional analytic approaches and bias analysis to account for sources of systematic error.

2021

Fausto Bustos
I’m an ORISE Data Science Fellow collaborating with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. I provide data analytic expertise, computational and statistical assistance, and substantive scientific knowledge to various NIAID divisions in furtherance of their research missions. In addition, I am an award-winning infectious disease epidemiologist specializing in COVID-19, Zika, chikungunya, and dengue. Since 2015, I have conducted epidemiological, clinical, and spatial research on epidemics of these viral diseases in Managua, Nicaragua. When not watching science fiction or cooking-centric reality TV shows, you’ll find me immersed in a good stats book and eating key lime pie.

2020

Michael Webster-Clark
Michael Webster-Clark is currently a post-doctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After receiving his Doctor of Pharmacy degree from Northeastern University, his interest in comparative effectiveness research and the external validity of randomized trials prompted him to seek a PhD at UNC. His current research areas include propensity scores, transportability and generalizability of randomized trials, and pharmacoepidemiology methods.

2019

Brittany Blouin
Brittany Blouin completed her PhD in Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University in November 2018. Her research focuses on global health and epidemiologic methods with particular interest in infectious and parasitic diseases, child health and nutrition, and field research. She has approximately ten years of experience working and living in Peru, where her PhD research was conducted. She is currently a consultant on a joint project between UNAIDS and McGill University and a Senior Advisor for the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Parasite Epidemiology and Control.

2018

Michael Harhay

2017

Ellicott Matthay
Ellicott Matthay is a PhD Candidate in Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. She received dual bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Community Health from Tufts University and an MPH in Global Health Metrics and Evaluation from the University of Washington. Her current research focuses on the causes and consequences of community violence, with specific attention to contextual determinants of self-harm and the evaluation of violence-related policies and programs in California. She is invested in novel epidemiologic and biostatistical methods, and in generating actionable evidence that assists high-level decision-makers to shift the major determinants of population health.

2016

Neil Goldstein
Neal D. Goldstein, PhD, MBI is an infectious disease epidemiologist currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at Christiana Care Health System (Newark, DE). His research spans several disciplines including vaccine-preventable diseases, sexual minority health, pediatric infectious diseases, and women’s health surrounding pregnancy. He also possesses a background in biomedical informatics with detailed knowledge of hardware and software in the healthcare domain. Most recently, he has focused on translational epidemiology, or moving from knowledge generation to application and advocacy. He writes a science blog, which is available at www.goldsteinepi.com/blog, and can be followed on Twitter (@goldsteinepi).

2015

Hailey Banack
Hailey Banack is a fourth year doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Her thesis supervisor is Dr. Jay Kaufman. Hailey’s dissertation research is focused on conceptual and methodological issues related to the study of obesity, cardiovascular disease and mortality. She is specifically interested in examining the “obesity paradox” and methods for addressing selection bias in epidemiologic research.

2014

Samantha Parker
Samantha Parker received her doctorate in epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health in 2014, where she was a pre-doctoral fellow on Boston University’s reproductive, perinatal, and pediatric training grant. Her dissertation work focused on reproductive history and the risk of preeclampsia. She currently works at the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University on case-control studies of risk factors for birth defects and a follow-up study of prenatal exposures and childhood neurodevelopment.

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