IMS Grace Wahba Award and Lecture
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Volume 50 • Issue 4 IMS Bulletin June/July 2021 IMS Grace Wahba Award and Lecture The IMS is pleased to announce the creation of a new award and lecture, to honor CONTENTS Grace Wahba’s monumental contributions to statistics and science. These include her 1 New IMS Grace Wahba Award pioneering and influential work in mathematical statistics, machine learning and opti- and Lecture mization; broad and career-long interdisciplinary collaborations that have had a sig- 2 Members’ news : Kenneth nificant impact in epidemiology, bioinformatics and climate sciences; and outstanding Lange, Kerrie Mengersen, Nan mentoring during her 51-year career as an educator. The inaugural Wahba award and Laird, Daniel Remenik, Richard lecture is planned for the 2022 IMS annual meeting in London, then annually at JSM. Samworth Grace Wahba is one of the outstanding statisticians of our age. She has transformed 4 Grace Wahba: profile the fields of mathematical statistics and applied statistics. Wahba’s RKHS theory plays a central role in nonparametric smoothing and splines, and its importance is widely 7 Caucus for Women in recognized. In addition, Wahba’s contributions Statistics 50th anniversary straddle the boundary between statistics and 8 IMS Travel Award winners optimization, and have led to fundamental break- 9 Radu’s Rides: Notes to my Past throughs in machine learning for solving problems Self arising in prediction, classification and cross-vali- dation. She has paved a foundation for connecting 10 Previews: Nancy Zhang, Ilmun Kim theory and practice of function estimation, and has developed, along with her students, unified 11 Nominate IMS Lecturers estimation methods, scalable algorithms and 12 IMS Fellows 2021 standard software toolboxes that have made regu- 16 Recent papers: AIHP and larization approaches widely applicable to solving Observational Studies complex problems in modern science discovery Grace Wahba and technology innovation. Wahba is listed as a 17 Carver Medal 2021 Highly Cited Researcher in Mathematics by ISIHighlyCited.com; her work has received 18 The Annals Quadfecta more than 50,000 citations, according to Google Scholar. 19 COPSS Award winners Over the years, Wahba pursued her passion for research driven by real problems, and let natural curiosity be her guide. This led to a groundbreaking career in statistics 22 Meetings (including online) at a time when the odds of a woman earning international acclaim in the field were 24 Employment Opportunities slim, to say the least. 24 Calendar of Meetings In establishing the IMS Grace Wahba Award and Lecture, the IMS further affirms its commitment to honoring outstanding statisticians, regardless of gender, to support- Information for Advertisers 27 ing diversity in statistical science and in its membership, and to inspiring statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists and scientific researchers in general. The lecture will be a highlight at IMS meetings, and an intellectually inspiring presentation with broad appeal to a large audience. The committee members Jianqing Fan, Sunduz Keles, Douglas Nychka, Bernard Silverman, Daniela Witten, Wing H. Wong, Bin Yu, Ming Yuan, and Hao Helen Read it online: Zhang, are working on the details of the award — including raising the endowment imstat.org/news fund (contribute via https://imstat.org/shop/donation/). Updates will be forthcoming. In the meantime, you can read more about Grace Wahba’s work and life on page 4. IMS Bulletin 2 . IMS Bulletin Volume 50 . Issue 4 Volume 50 • Issue 4 June/July 2021 IMS Members’ News ISSN 1544-1881 Kenneth Lange elected to US National Academy of Sciences Contact information The US National Academy of Sciences has announced the election of 120 members — 59 IMS Bulletin Editor: Tati Howell of whom are women, the most elected in a single year — and 30 international members in [email protected] recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Among Managing Editor: Bob Keener them is IMS Fellow Kenneth Lange. Contributing Editors: Kenneth Lange is the Maxine and Eugene Rosenfeld Professor Radu Craiu, Anirban DasGupta, Yoram Gat, Ruobin Gong, David Hand, Takis of Computational Genetics and Chair of the Department of Konstantopoulos, Xiao-Li Meng and Human Genetics, at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kavita Ramanan and a professor of statistics and of biomathematics. He previously w https://imstat.org/news served as chair of the Department of Biomathematics for nine years https://www.facebook.com/IMSTATI and has held permanent or visiting appointments at the University https://twitter.com/InstMathStat of New Hampshire, University of Michigan, University of Helsinki, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. He has authored four advanced IMS Dues and Subscriptions Office textbooks and published nearly 200 scientific papers. Kenneth Lange Contact the IMS regarding your dues, Two themes dominate Lange’s research. One is the development membership, subscriptions, orders or of novel mathematical methods in optimization theory, applied probability, and computa- change of address: tional statistics. The other is a devotion to realistic biological modeling. Although there is t 877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA] bound to be a tension between these two poles, the advancement of the biomedical sciences t +1 216 295 2340 [international] depends on bridging the gap. His contributions to genetic epidemiology, population genet- f +1 216 295 5661 ics, membrane physiology, demography, oncology, and medical imaging highlight some e [email protected] of the connections. Many of his landmark papers predate by a decade or more the current IMS Business Office flood of biological applications of hidden Markov chains, Markov chain Monte Carlo, and Executive Director, Elyse Gustafson high-dimensional optimization. Contact the IMS regarding any other Lange has also made important software contributions to the human genetics commu- matter, including advertising, copyright nity. His program Mendel is the “Swiss army knife” of statistical genetics packages. He and permission, offprint orders, copyright faculty colleague Eric Sobel are constantly adding new utilities, with a recent emphasis on transfer, societal matters, meetings, fellows special handling of the enormous data sets generated by SNP (single nucleotide polymor- nominations and content of publications: phism) association studies. t 877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA] Neil Risch, Michael Boehnke, Daniel Weeks, Eric Sobel, Eric Schadt, and Laura t +1 216 295 2340 [international] Lazzeroni are among his former graduate students. This list constitutes a Who’s Who of f +1 216 295 5661 statistical genetics. He continues to mentor and inspire bright students who combine e [email protected] mathematical talent with biological curiosity. Lange was elected a Fellow of IMS in 2012, for “groundbreaking developments in Executive Committee statistical computing and statistical genetics as a prolific and rigorous scholar and mentor.” President: Regina Liu He was awarded the COPSS George W. Snedecor Award in 1993. [email protected] President-Elect: Krzysztof (Chris) Burdzy Kerrie Mengersen delivering ISI President’s Invited Lecture at WSC [email protected] Professor Kerrie Mengersen is the International Statistical Institute President’s Invited Past President: Susan Murphy Speaker for the Virtual World Statistics Congress, WSC2021 (July 11–16, 2021: https:// [email protected] www.isi2021.org/). Kerrie Mengersen is Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Queensland Treasurer: Zhengjun Zhang University of Technology, and an incoming Vice-President of the ISI. Her work spans [email protected] Bayesian statistics, computational statistics, environmental, genetic and health statistics, Program Secretary: Ming Yuan [email protected] statistical consulting and citizen science. She was a guest on the Stats+Stories podcast “Stats Executive Secretary: Edsel Peña in Celebration of Earth Day” and “Explaining Bayes Better”. These (and many others) are [email protected] available to listen to at https://statsandstories.net/episodes. = access published papers online IMS Journals and Publications June/July . 2021 IMS Bulletin . 3 Annals of Statistics: Ming Yuan, Richard Samworth https://imstat.org/aos https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aos Annals of Applied Statistics: Karen Kafadar https://imstat.org/aoas More Members’ News https://projecteuclid.org/aoas Annals of Probability: Amir Dembo https://imstat.org/aop International Prize in Statistics winner Nan Laird in podcast episode https://projecteuclid.org/aop The International Prize in Statistics is the top award in the field of statistics. As we reported Annals of Applied Probability: Francois Delarue, Peter Friz in the last issue, this year it was awarded to Harvard biostatistician Professor Nan Laird. https://imstat.org/aap https://projecteuclid.org/aoap Among other things, Laird helped develop the statistical methods that allow researchers to Statistical Science: Sonia Petrone extract detailed information from longitudinal studies. https://imstat.org/sts In episode 45 of the ACEMS podcast, The Random Sample, https://projecteuclid.org/ss IMS Collections Nan Laird talks with host Louise Ryan about the award, and looks https://projecteuclid.org/imsc back at some of the highlights of her career. Joining them is one IMS Monographs and IMS Textbooks: Nancy Reid of Laird’s colleagues from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public https://www.imstat.org/journals-and- publications/ims-monographs/ Health,