The editors and editorial board of the journal Epidemiology have awarded this year’s Rothman Epidemiology Prize to Esra Kürüm, an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics.

The $5,000 award is funded by a private endowment and is given annually for the best paper published in the journal in the preceding year. The selection criteria are importance, originality, clarity of thought, and excellence in writing, according to Epidemiology.

Kürüm’s winning paper, titled “Bayesian Model Averaging with Change Points to Assess the Impact of Vaccination and Public Health Interventions,” appeared in the November 2017 issue. The paper combined Bayesian model averaging with change-point models to estimate vaccine-associated changes in hospitalizations related to pneumococcal infection in children. Two years after vaccine introduction, the methods detected reductions in all-cause pneumonia hospitalizations for the youngest children in the United States, Brazil, and Chile, while avoiding biases that frequently affect other approaches to time-trend analyses.