IMS Bulletin 31(4)
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Volume 31 Issue 4 IMS Bulletin July/August 2002 President Bush Honors Rao CONTENTS 1 C R Rao receives Medal of Science 2 Contacting IMS; Members’ News 4 Profile: Bruce Trumbo & the Carver Medal 7 New IMS Fellows 8 New IMS President- Elect & Council Photo courtesy of the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation: Medals Foundation: Technology courtesy& Science Photo of the National www.nationalmedals.org Letters to the Editor 9 IMS past president Calyampudi R Rao, combinatorial arrangements, known as 10 Obituaries: Emeritus Holder of the Eberly Family Orthogonal Arrays, which has become K S Banerjee, Indra Chair in Statistics, and Director of widely used to control and improve Chakravarti, Nathan the Center for Multivariate Analysis, the quality of manufactured goods. He Mantel Pennsylvania State U, received the Medal developed estimation theory in small 12 IMS Meetings of Science from President Bush in a samples, which greatly extended the scope ceremony at the White House in June. of statistical methods in practical work. 15 News, Announcements and Meetings around He is one of only fifteen scientists to Rao was the first to introduce differential the world receive America’s highest scientific honor geometric techniques in discussing this year, and the only statistician. problems of statistical inference, based on Employment 19 His citation read: C R Rao’s pioneering Rao’s Distance Function, which is now an Opportunities work in multivariate analysis has become active field of research. 24 International Calendar the foundation of statistics, with a President Bush said, “e science and of Statistical Events significant impact on applications in technology leaders here today have turned 27 Information for medical diagnosis, evolutionary genetics, genius and persistence into knowledge, Advertisers and signal detection theory. Rao has technology that will shape lives for focused equally on the application decades to come. All of our honorees, and of statistical methods to real-world their colleagues throughout the United problems. One of his early books, States, are asking questions whose answers Advanced Statistical Methods in Biometric will improve lives not only here at home, Research (1952), was written to assist but around the world.” biomedical researchers who were not We extend our warm congratulations to equipped to develop the new methods of C R Rao. analysis their data demanded. In response A full account of the ceremony, by to the needs of industry, he introduced a Annemarie Mountz, is at www.psu.edu/ new method of experimentation through ur/extra/2002/rao/main.html IMS Bulletin 2 . IMS Bulletin Volume 31 . Issue 4 Volume 31, Issue 4 July/August 2002 News from IMS members ISSN 0146-3942 Nobel Laureate James Heckman Receives ASA Honor e Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA) has selected James J. Heckman to receive the annual Statistician of the Year award on June , . Professor Contact Heckman, a member of IMS, is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Information Economics at the University of Chicago, where he has served since . He holds a parallel appointment as Director of Social Program Evaluation at the Harris School of To contact the IMS Bulletin: Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and is also a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Bulletin Editor Bernard Silverman Professor Heckman earned his bachelor’s degree at Colorado College and his Master’s Assistant Editor Tati Howell and Doctorate degrees at Princeton University. He has received numerous honors for his Submissions in MS Word or plain research, including the Nobel Prize in for his development of theory and methods for text, please. analyzing selective samples. Send by email: [email protected] Professor Heckman’s research combines both methodological and empirical interests or mail disk to: IMS Bulletin in evaluating the impact of social programs on the economy and on society. He has PO Box 1986 written on the impact of civil rights, affirmative action, labor supply and human capital Bristol accumulation, the impact of job training on earnings and employment, the impact of BS99 1TL unions on labor markets in developing countries, and on skill certification programs. He UK has also contributed substantially to literature in applied and theoretical econometrics. His methodological work on selection bias and on the evaluation of social programs is widely To contact the IMS regarding your dues, used, as is his research on the analysis of heterogeneity in consumer preferences and in the membership, subscriptions, orders or analysis of longitudinal data. He has a series of influential papers on the identifiability of change of address: broad classes of econometric models. Institute of Mathematical Statistics Dues and Subscriptions Office David O Siegmund elected to National Academy of Sciences 9650 Rockville Pike, Suite L2310 David O Siegmund, professor of statistics at Stanford University Bethesda, and IMS past President (-) has been elected to the National MD 20814-3998 Academy of Sciences (NAS). He is among new members and USA foreign associates selected in recognition of their distinguished and t 301.530.7029 f 301.571.5728 continuing achievements in original research. e [email protected] David works at the interface between probability and statistics. He has presented elegant solutions to several difficult problems in probability theory that are of interest to applied statisticians. ese To contact the IMS regarding any other mainly concern sequential analysis—the study of how data should matter, including advertising, copyright be accumulated in an experimental situation. He pioneered the permission, offprint orders, copyright development of methods that are used in the analysis of sequential clinical trials, allowing transfer, societal matters, meetings, fellows pharmaceutical investigators to assess, for instance, if a new medicinal treatment is better nominations and content of publications: or worse than an old one, and if the results warrant stopping an FDA Phase III clinical Executive Director, Elyse Gustafson trial. His recent work has focused on different problems in statistical genetics, especially IMS Business Office PO Box 22718 genetic mapping, or identifying the locations of genes that are involved in specific traits. Beachwood, He employs similar methods to aid the analysis of sequences of amino acids that make OH 44122 up proteins. David earned a doctorate from Columbia University in and served on USA the Columbia faculty until , with a brief stint at Stanford from to . He t 216.295.2340 has worked at Stanford since accepting a full professorship in . Author of two books f 216.921.6703 on sequential analysis, David has been recipient of Guggenheim, Einstein and Fulbright e [email protected] fellowships, the Humboldt Prize, the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Wilks Medal of the American Statistical Association. July/August . 2002 IMS Bulletin . 3 Executive Committee President Iain Johnstone Terry Lyons elected FRS [email protected] Professor Terence John Lyons, Wallis Professor of President-Elect Raghu Varadhan [email protected] Mathematics, University of Oxford, and a member of IMS, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Past President Bernard Silverman [email protected] one of only four mathematicians to be elected FRS this year. Peter Hall writes, “Terry’s deep insight and breadth of Executive Secretary Alicia Carriquiry vision have allowed him to sharpen and extend probability [email protected] theory and potential theory in several fundamental ways. Treasurer Julia Norton He has made a range of major contributions on either side [email protected] of the frontier between analysis and probability theory, but Program Sec. Susan Murphy his development of a stochastic calculus for rough signals [email protected] is of particular significance. His technology came as quite a surprise to other workers in the field, and represents a sea change in methods for stochastic analysis. Relative to IMS Editors conventional techniques, Terry’s approach is more direct but also more demanding, more The Annals of Statistics powerful but in important ways more transparent. It offers new opportunities for tackling Jon Wellner [email protected] previously intractable problems.” & John Marden [email protected] Statistical Society of Canada Honors IMS Members The Annals of Probability Dr Muni Srivastava, an IMS Member, has been awarded the Statistical Society Thomas Kurtz of Canada Gold Medal. e medal is awarded to “a person who has made substantial [email protected] contributions to statistics, or to probability, either to mathematical developments or in The Annals of Applied Probability applied work”. e SSC Gold Medal is intended to honor current leaders in their fields. Søren Asmussen e SSC has also honored another IMS member: Dr Jonathan Taylor has received [email protected] the Pierre Robillard Award. is award recognizes his thesis, “Euler Characteristics Statistical Science of Gaussian Fields on Manifolds”, as the best doctoral thesis in statistics defended at George Casella [email protected] a Canadian university in : his supervisor was Professor Keith Worsley of McGill University. Jonathan is currently an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. IMS Lecture Notes - Monograph Series Joel Greenhouse e Award is in honour of Pierre Robillard, a very talented and dynamic young [email protected]