Kaidi Kang wins 2025 Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award
Kaidi Kang has been named a recipient of Vanderbilt University’s Provost Pathbreaking Discovery Award, which “recognizes doctoral students who exhibit exceptional academic excellence in publications, awards, patents, and other forms of national or international distinction.” Kang, who successfully defended his dissertation earlier this month, has delivered ten invited talks to date, first-authored papers in Nature and Psychometrika (with the latter one of the journal’s five most downloaded papers of 2023), and performed outstanding collaborative work as a biostatistician for a number of projects, including an observational study of bariatric surgery outcomes, normative modeling of thalamic nuclei to better understand and treat schizophrenia, and clinical trial design for late-life depression investigator Warren Taylor. Kang has also won awards for his work on Alzheimer’s disease, going well above and beyond the research expected for class and dissertation projects. He is the 2024 winner of the Department of Biostatistics’ W.S. Gosset Award for Exceptional Research.
