2012 ISDS Award for Outstanding Research Articles in Biosurveillance

The International Society for Disease Surveillance Research Committee developed the Award for Outstanding Research Articles in Biosurveillance (2012 Award) in order to recognize disease surveillance scientists and professionals for contributions to their fields of research.

The initial 2012 Award candidate pool consisted of articles summarized by members of the ISDS Literature Review Subcommittee between January 2010 and March 2012. A nomination period was open from June 4th through June 25th, during which anyone could nominate one or more of the articles in the initial pool or write-in any relevant article published in 2010 or later. The Award Committee then reviewed all nominated articles and narrowed the list down to 5 finalist articles in each award category, using category-specific criteria. The ISDS membership voted to determine the final award winners. 

At the culmination of this process, the ISDS Research Committee is proud to announce the Awards for Outstanding Research Articles in Biosurveillance:

Impact on Field of Biosurveillance Category 

First Prize: Lucero CA, Oda G, Cox K, Maldonado F, Lombardo J, Wojcik R, Holodniy M. Enhanced health event detection and influenza surveillance using a joint Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense biosurveillance application. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2011;11:56.   

Second Prize: Peter W, Najmi AH, Burkom HS. Reducing false alarms in syndromic surveillance. Statistics in Medicine. 2011. 

Tie for Third Prize:  

• Finnell JT, Overhage JM, Grannis S. All Health Care is Not Local: An Evaluation of the Distribution of Emergency Department Care Delivered in Indiana. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011;2011:409-416.
• Kay M, Zerr DM, Englund JA, Cadwell BL, Kuypers J, Swenson P, Kwan-Gett TS, Bell SL, Duchin JS. Shedding of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus among health care personnel, Seattle, Washington, USA. Emerg Infect Dis. 2011;17:639-644. 

Scientific Achievement Category   

First Prize: Gesteland PH, Livnat Y, Galli N, Samore MH, Gundlapalli AV. The EpiCanvas infectious disease weather map: an interactive visual exploration of temporal and spatial correlations. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association: JAMIA. 2012.    

Second Prize: Fine AM, Nizet V, Mandl KD. Improved diagnostic accuracy of group A streptococcal pharyngitis with use of real-time biosurveillance. Ann. Intern. Med. 2011;155(6):345-352. 

Tie for Third Prize:

• Hampton KH, Serre ML, Gesink DC, Pilcher CD, Miller WC. Adjusting for sampling variability in sparse data: geostatistical approaches to disease mapping. Int J Health Geogr. 2011;10:54.
• Que J, Tsui FC. Rank-based spatial clustering: an algorithm for rapid outbreak detection. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2011;18(3):218.       

We congratulate all of the authors of the winning articles for this achievement.

Don’t miss the presentations by Dr. Cynthia Lucero-Obusan, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Dr. Per Hans Gesteland, University of Utah School of Medicine, at the 2012 ISDS Conference!

For more information about the 2012 Award, please visit the Award webpage.