Dr. Thilo Welz wins the Gustav-Adolf-Lienert Prize
For his work Cluster-robust estimators for multivariate mixed-effects meta-regression, Dr. Thilo Welz is awarded the 1st Gustav-Adolf-Lienert Prize 2023 of the International Biometric Society. The prize is the highest young scientist award of the DR-IBS. Eligible for application are primarily accepted publications in international peer-reviewed journals, software packages or comparable work in the last 2 years. The primary criterion is scientific excellence. Thilo Welz is already the third award winner after Prof. Sarah Friedrich (Augsburg) and Prof. Dennis Dobler (Amsterdam), who did his PhD under Markus Pauly.
His paper makes important contributions to research synthesis, more specifically to meta-analysis. Meta-analyses allow the combination of results from different studies and are among the most important analytical methods in biomedical applications. In this process, the results of individual studies are combined to enable accurate (overall) effect size estimation. In his work, which he co-authored with Wolfgang Viechtbauer (Maastricht) and Markus Pauly and which was published in 2023 in the journal Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, he proposes new estimation methods that enable robust inference for so-called multivariate meta-analyses with different effect sizes. The work was done as part of a joint DFG project by Tim Friede (Göttingen) and Markus Pauly (Valid methods for meta-analyses with few studies or small numbers of cases), in which Wolfgang Viechtbauer participated as a Mercator Fellow.