At the 37th New England Statistics Symposium, graduate students Christopher Odoom and Denis Folitse each won student poster awards (sponsored by insurance company Munich Re). The conference was held at the University of Connecticut on 20-24 May 2024. Denis’s poster was "Improved Bandwidth Selector for Local Polynomial Derivative Estimation,” and Christopher’s was “Nonparametric Derivative Estimation with Penalized B-Splines: Asymptotics and and an Improved Estimator.” Both Christopher and Denis did this research while they were MS students in the department, and both students are advised by Professor John Staudenmayer. In addition, a former graduate student in our department, Dr. Bright Antwi Boasiako, ’24 PhD, helped with their projects, and he was a coauthor on both posters. Starting in fall 2024, Denis and Christopher will continue at UMass as PhD students.