Ming Yuan awarded Georgia Tech Coca-Cola Junior Professorship
Ming Yuan, associate professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), has been awarded the Coca-Cola Junior Professorship for a three-year term.
“During Dr. Yuan’s time on the ISyE faculty, he has made valuable contributions in research, teaching, and service. Dr. Yuan’s exceptional teaching ability is evident in the excellent teaching evaluations and student praise he receives. We are fortunate to have him as a colleague and now as the ISyE’s newest Coca-Cola Junior Professor,” said Jane C. Ammons, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair.
The Coca-Cola Junior Professorship is supported by a gift from Coca-Cola, in order to support research and development in ISyE. Endowed professorships, such as this one, are awarded to outstanding faculty, ensuring them the resources they need to remain at the forefront of their fields and to lead teaching and research efforts in their key areas.
Yuan received his PhD in statistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He also holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and information science from the University of Science & Technology of China. Yuan’s current research interests include statistical learning, bioinformatics, and methods of regularization.

Sloan Research Fellowships

IMS members Allan Sly (University of California, Berkeley) and Sebastien Roch (University of California, Los Angeles) are among the Sloan Research Fellows selected in 2012.
“Today’s Sloan Research Fellows are tomorrow’s Nobel Prize winners,” said Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These outstanding men and women are responsible for some of the most exciting science being done today. The Foundation is proud to support them during this pivotal stage of their careers.”
The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. The list of recipients is at http://www.sloan.org/fellowships/page/21

Honorary degrees awarded to C.R. Rao

IMS Fellow C.R. Rao has received three more Honorary Doctorate degrees: a DSc from University of Colombo, Sri Lanka in December 2011; a DSc from Karanatic University, Dharwad in January 2012; and a DLitt (Vachaspati) from the International Sanskrit University, Tirupati, in February 2012. This brings to 36 the number of honorary degrees Professor Rao has received from universities in 19 countries.
Dr. Rao was formerly the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, where he worked for 40 years before retiring at the mandatory retirement age of 60. He is the founder of the new institute, the C.R. Rao Advanced Institute for Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science (C R Rao AIMSCS) in the campus of the University of Hyderabad. At the age of 92, he is still actively trying to develop the institute as an institute of national importance for advanced research in mathematics, statistics and computer science. He is currently Eberly Professor Emeritus at Penn State and Research Professor, University at Buffalo, USA, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Advisor of the C R Rao AIMSCS. He started the Statistics Olympiad program, the first in the world, to encourage the study of statistics and has plans to establish a museum of statistics for public education of statistics.
In the December 2011 issue of Significance magazine, the editor Julian Champkin interviewed Professor Rao, of whom he says, “C.R. Rao is a great name from the golden age of statistics. His work was done in India; his intellect shaped statistics worldwide.”

C.R. Rao (centre) receives his 36th honorary degree, at the International Sanskrit University, in Tirupati, India