Volume 42 • Issue 6 IMS Bulletin September 2013 COPSS Awards at JSM CONTENTS COPSS, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (IMS, ASA, SSC and 1 COPSS Awards ENAR/WNAR) presented its 2013 awards to four IMS members, three of whom are Fellows, at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Montreal on August 7. 2 Members’ News: Sourav The biannual George W. Snedecor Award honors an individual who was instrumental Chatterjee; Mike West; Sastry in the development of statistical theory in biometry. The 2013 Snedecor Award was Pantula; IMS Lecturers 2014; presented to John David (Jack) Kalbfleisch, University of Michigan, “For foundational Shahjahan Khan; Eswar contribution to the field of biometry, especially for innovative analysis methods for failure time Phadia data, event history analysis, mixture models and likelihood theory. For influential collabora- 4 X-L Files: Rejection Pursuit tive research, especially in the area of solid organ transplantation. For exceptional mentoring 6 Meeting reports: SPA; NRC of junior researchers, exemplary senior leadership of statistical groups, and steadfast service to the profession.” Obituaries: Maurice 8 The F. N. David Award recognizes a female statistician who exemplifies the contribu- Priestley; Wenbo Li tions of Florence Nightingale David, an accomplished statistician in combinatorial prob- 10 IMS Presidential Address ability theory. The 2013 F. N. David Award was presented toLynne Billard, University 13 Travel grants of Georgia, “For her world-leading research in sequential analysis, stochastic processes, epidemiology and symbolic data analysis; for her extensive collaborations, especially in poultry 15 Statistics2013 workshop; science and computer science; for exceptional contributions to leadership in the profession; and NSF update for outstanding contributions as a role model, fostering opportunities especially for academic 16 JSM 2013 in pictures women as leaders, researchers, administrators, and educators.” 19 Recent papers: Annals of The COPSS Presidents’ Award goes annually to a young member of the statistical Probability; Annals of Applied community in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. Probability; IMS Textbooks This year’s recipient is Marc A. Suchard, University of California, Los Angeles, “For 21 Terence’s Stuff: Statistics extraordinarily wide-ranging and insightful contributions to the statistical sciences in the and The War areas of Bayesian inference, computation and stochastic processes; for innovative statistical modeling and novel computational techniques for formerly intractable problems in molecular 22 IMS meetings epidemiology, evolutionary medicine, phylogenetics, phylogeography, computational biology 26 Other meetings and emerging massive public health data sets; for a panoply of flexible, well-regarded and 28 Employment Opportunities widely used statistical software tools for the applied sciences; for extensive and creative statisti- cal applications across an impressive range of human inquiry; and for service to the profession 31 International Calendar of Statistical Events as a prolific and dedicated mentor of the next generation of statisticians. Finally, the recipient of the R.A. Fisher Award & Lectureship, established in 1963 35 Information for Advertisers to honor the contributions of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher and the work of a present-day statistician, was Peter J. Bickel, University of California, Berkeley, “For groundbreaking contributions to semiparametric and nonparametric methods, adaptive estimation, and robust statistics; for applying in-depth and intricate theoretical analysis to realistic problems in the biological sciences; for penetrating and insightful analysis of scientific methodology which has yielded a lasting impact on our understanding of both theory and methods; and for excep- Read it online at tional training and mentoring of students, leadership of professional societies, and leadership http://bulletin.imstat.org of his academic department.” IMSBulletin 2 . IMS Bulletin Volume 42 . Issue 6 Volume 42 • Issue 6 September 2013 IMS Members’ News ISSN 1544-1881 Sourav Chatterjee awarded 2013 Loève Prize Contact information The 2013 Line and Michel Loève International Prize in Probability IMS Bulletin Editor: Dimitris Politis has been awarded to Sourav Chatterjee of the Courant Institute. The Assistant Editor: Tati Howell prize, which carries a monetary award of $30,000, will be presented at Contributing Editors: a ceremony in Berkeley to be held in Fall 2013. Peter Bickel, Anirban DasGupta, Nicole Lazar, Xiao-Li Meng, Terry Speed Sourav Chatterjee received his PhD in 2005, advised by Persi Diaconis at Stanford University. His work has extraordinary breadth. On one side he has brought new ideas to bear upon classical topics— Contact the IMS Bulletin by email: Sourav Chatterjee e [email protected] an extension of Lindeberg’s proof of the central limit theorem to an w http://bulletin.imstat.org invariance principle for arbitrary smooth functions of weakly dependent random variables, https://www.facebook.com/IMSTATI a simpler proof of the famous KMT theorem on strong approximation of a random walk by Brownian motion, and a new version of Stein’s method, reducing a large class of normal Contact the IMS regarding your dues, approximation problems to variance bounding exercises. In other work, he has taken up membership, subscriptions, orders or change of address: Talagrand’s Challenge to Mathematicians (to give rigorous analysis of spin glass models from IMS Dues and Subscriptions Office statistical physics) by providing analyses of random overlap structures and showing that the 9650 Rockville Pike, Suite L3503A Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model is chaotic under small perturbations of the couplings at any Bethesda, MD 20814-3998 temperature in the absence of an external field. Other topics to which he has made substantial USA contributions include large deviations for random graphs and random matrices, first-passage t 877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA] t +1 216 295 5661[international] percolation, and probabilistic methods for discrete nonlinear Schrödinger equations. f +1 301 634 7099 Among his other honors, Sourav received the IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award in e [email protected] 2008, and was a Medallion Lecturer in 2012. The prize commemorates Michel Loève, Professor at the University of California, Contact the IMS regarding any other Berkeley, from 1948 until his untimely death in 1979. The Prize was established by his widow, matter, including advertising, copyright Line, shortly before her death in 1992. Awarded every two years, it is intended to recognize permission, offprint orders, copyright outstanding contributions by researchers in probability who are under 45 years old. transfer, societal matters, meetings, fellows nominations and content of publications: Mitchell Prize awarded to Mike West and co-authors Sastry Pantula Dean Executive Director, Elyse Gustafson IMS Business Office The Mitchell Prize is awarded in recognition of an outstanding paper Oregon State Univ PO Box 22718, Beachwood that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied Sastry Pantula has OH 44122, USA problem. The Prize is jointly sponsored by the Section on Bayesian moved to Oregon t 877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA] Statistical Science (SBSS) of the ASA, the International Society State University as t +1 216 295 5661[international] f +1 216 295 5661 for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA), and the Mitchell Prize Founders’ Dean of the College e [email protected] Committee. of Science. Sastry Mike West, the Arts & Sciences Professor of Statistics & Decision served on the faculty Executive Committee Sciences at Duke University, received the award at JSM, with his of North Carolina President: Bin Yu co-author Ioanna Manolopoulou (University College London), on State University [email protected] behalf of their co-authors Melanie Matheu, Mike Cahalan and Tom since 1982, and is President-Elect: Erwin Bolthausen [email protected] Kepler. The award was for their studies of spatio-dynamic modelling a former director Past President: Hans R. Künsch in systems biology/immunology in their 2012 JASA paper entitled of the National [email protected] “Bayesian Spatio-Dynamic Modelling in Cell Motility Studies: Science Foundation’s Treasurer: Jean Opsomer Learning Nonlinear Taxic Fields Guiding Immune Response.” Division of [email protected] This 2012 award winning paper was cited, “for its sophisticated Mathematical Program Secretary: Judith Rousseau [email protected] development of model-based inference methods in the expanding Sciences. Executive Secretary: Aurore Delaigle field of immune-cell dynamics.” [email protected] = access published papers online IMS Journals and Publications September . 2013 IMS Bulletin . 3 Annals of Statistics: Peter Hall and Runze Li http://imstat.org/aos http://projecteuclid.org/aos Annals of Applied Statistics: Stephen Fienberg http://imstat.org/aoas IMS Members’ News http://projecteuclid.org/aoas Annals of Probability: Krzysztof Burdzy http://imstat.org/aop IMS Special Invited Lectures in 2014 http://projecteuclid.org/aop Each year the IMS Committee on Special Lectures selects a number of leading statisticians Annals of Applied Probability: Timo Seppäläinen and probabilists to give invited lectures at IMS sponsored and co-sponsored meetings around http://imstat.org/aap http://projecteuclid.org/aoap the world. In 2014, there will be a Wald, Neyman