Ars Conjectandi Lecture at JSM 2013

2013 marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Jacob Bernoulli’s book, Ars Conjectandi, in 1713. In recognition of this, IMS and the Bernoulli Society are jointly sponsoring the Ars Conjectandi lecture at next year’s Joint Statistical Meetings in Montreal, Canada (August 3–8, 2013). The speaker will be IMS Fellow David Spiegelhalter, who is Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK.

Lefkopoulou memorial lecture by Rafael Irizarry

The Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, has named Professor Rafael Irizarry, Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as the 2012 Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lecturer. Professor Irizarry will present a lecture on September 13 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The lectureship was established in perpetuity in memory of Dr. Myrto Lefkopoulou, a beloved faculty member and graduate of Harvard School of Public Health. Each year the Lectureship is awarded to a promising statistician who has made contributions to either collaborative or methodologic research in the applications of statistical methods to biology or medicine and/or has shown excellence in the teaching of biostatistics.

Previous recipients are Geert Molenberghs, Mark van der Laan, Jianqing Fan, Francesca Dominici, Heping Zhang, Xihong Lin, David Dunson and Jeffrey Morris.

Nominations for next year’s lectureship are welcome and should be sent to: Myrto Lefkopoulou Lecture Committee, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, 655 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. Nominations should include a letter of nomination and a CV. The nomination deadline is March 31, 2013.

Marc Hallin receives Humboldt Award

Professor Marc Hallin of the Free University of Brussels, European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) has been elected the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award. He was nominated for this award by the German scientist Prof. Holger Dette, Universität Bochum. This award is conferred in recognition of lifetime achievements in research. In addition, the awardee is invited to carry out research projects of his own choice in cooperation with specialist colleagues in Germany, to further promote international scientific cooperation. See http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/programmes-by-target-group.html

Bruce Lindsay Selected as Penn State’s Eberly Family Chair in Statistics

Bruce Lindsay, Willaman Professor of Statistics and head of the Department of Statistics at Penn State University, has been appointed as Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics, one of the highest honors awarded to faculty members in Penn State’s Eberly College of Science. The appointment was made in recognition of Lindsay’s national and international reputation for excellence in research and teaching.

Lindsay’s statistical research is centered around likelihood-based statistical inferences. He has published numerous papers that are viewed as fundamental innovations on important topics related to the analysis of scientific data. Lindsay has focused on statistical methods that are useful for research in other scientific disciplines; for example, he has constructed models and analyses that have been applied to biological data from genomic studies. Lindsay is recognized particularly for the methods he developed for working with mixture models, which are used when data are collected from a mixture of populations. His work in this area is recognized as a major contribution to the foundations of statistical theory. Lindsay was chosen in 1993 to deliver ten lectures as the principal speaker at a regional conference organized by the National Science Foundation Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences; he has presented invited talks at scientific meetings around the world. He was the 2010 COPSS Fisher Lecturer.

Lindsay has supervised 30 PhD degree recipients during his time at Penn State. Highly regarded for his skills as a mentor, Lindsay said his students are one of his main sources of inspiration for the development of new scientific ideas. In recognition of his outstanding support of students doing research, Lindsay, was honored in 1998 by the Penn State chapter of the scientific research society, Sigma Xi.

Among the many honors he has received for his research work, Lindsay is a co-winner of the 1997 Snedecor Award given by the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies for the best paper in biometrics published during 1995 and 1996. In 1996, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 1990, he was honored with a Humboldt Senior Scientist Research Award. He was named a Fellow of the IMS in 1987 and of the ASA in 1998.

Lindsay received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Oregon in 1969. At the beginning of his graduate education, Lindsay did graduate studies in mathematics at Yale University. He interrupted his graduate studies to serve in the US Coast Guard for four years during the Vietnam War. He subsequently earned a doctoral degree in biomathematics in 1978 at the University of Washington. During the next academic year, he was funded by an NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellowship to study at the Imperial College of London with his advisor, Sir David Cox.