Congratulations to Environmental Health Sciences student Yang Liu for winning the Charles and Dorothy Andrew Bird Award from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society.  Her dissertation work ‘’Inference and Management of Disease Connectomics: Portfolio Analysis and System Design’’ is completely focused into the development of universal mathematical models that incorporate the necessary and sufficient information to predict population health outcomes and include those into a portfolio decision analytical model for detecting optimal system design and management controls. She has uniquely applied and developed further information theoretical models for variable selection feeding stochastic models for infectious disease prediction. The award underlines her work that has the potential to revolutionize epidemiological methods and public health in general (toward a systemic and macro- consequential science) with additional impacts on other disciplines.