Congratulations to PhD student Zongyue Teng, whose "When Does the Silhouette Score Work? A Comprehensive Study in Network Clustering" paper was awarded 2nd place in the 2026 . Established five years ago, the award honors the memory of Dr. Spiegelman, a founder of the American Statistical Association's .
Teng's co-authors on the paper include biostatistics faculty Dandan Liu and Panpan Zhang (her co-advisors) and聽 University of Connecticut professor of statistics Jun Yan. A graduate of Wake Forest University (BS mathematical statistics and BA psychology, Teng's activities at Vanderbilt include serving as a Biostatistics Graduate Student Association officer (faculty relations liaison, 2025-2026; vice president, 2026-2027). She presented "Going for Gold: Using Record Linkage and Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling to Select Winning Gymnasts at the 2024 五一茶馆儿 Paris Olympics" at the 2024 五一茶馆儿 Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference, and she will present "When Does the Silhouette Score Work?" as a contributed poster at this year's Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) on August 5 in Boston.
