Chou-Chun Wu and Anthony Nguyen were awarded the Lusted Student Prize for their research related to decision-making for kidney disease.
Two doctoral candidates from the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering have been honored at the recent Society of Medical Decision Making (SMDM) Annual Conference. Chou-Chun Wu and Anthony Nguyen were both announced as recipients in two categories of the Lusted Student Prize for their research related to kidney disease. Both students work under the supervision of Assistant Professor Sze-chuan Suen.
Wu was awarded the Milt Weinstein Award for Outstanding Presentation in Applied Health Economics for his research on chronic kidney disease, and Nguyen won the Bruce Schackman Award for Outstanding Presentation in Health Services, Outcomes, and Policy Research for his end-stage kidney disease research.
Suen said that Wu had been collaborating with Assistant Professor Eugene Lin from the Keck School of Medicine of USC on methods to improve screening and decision-making processes for chronic kidney disease (CKD) treatments.
“We’re looking at when to do CKD screening for diabetics, since it’s a very debilitating disease and you try to catch chronic kidney disease as soon as possible. Diabetics are a high-risk population and so we’ve designed a decision process model to help do that type of screening and inform guidelines on how often patients should get screened according to their demographics,” Suen said.
Meanwhile Nguyen’s work involved the Apolipoprotein L1 (APOL 1) gene and its risks relating to end-stage kidney disease.
“Previous literature has shown APOL 1 to be linked to chronic kidney disease, and so we’re examining some of those links in regression analysis for chronic kidney disease patients,” Suen said.
Further details about the awards and recipients are available at the Society for Medical Decision Making website.
Published on December 8th, 2021
Last updated on December 8th, 2021