ICSA Distinguished Service Award

Howell Tong received a Distinguished Achievement award at the 2012 Joint Statistical Meeting in San Diego on 1 August 2012 from the International Chinese Statistical Association. This award honors his achievements and leadership in statistical research, education and statistical applications. Howell is an IMS Fellow and former Council member. He was a Council member and Chair of the European Section, Bernoulli Society, 1999–2001. He is known for his pioneering and authoritative work in nonlinear time series analysis and chaos, for which he was honored with a National Natural Science Prize (Class 2) from the People’s Republic of China in 2000 and a Guy Medal in Silver from the UK Royal Statistical Society in 2007. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2000. Howell retired from his chair of statistics at the London School of Economics in 2009 and is now an emeritus professor of statistics. He was the 2009 and 2010 Saw Swee Hock Professor of the National University of Singapore, and is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of the University of Hong Kong.

PJSOR Volume honors Mir Masoom Ali

The Pakistan Journal of Statistics and Operation Research (PJSOR) recently published a Special Volume in honor of Dr. Mir Masoom Ali, George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Statistics Emeritus at Ball State University, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Among the 78 authors and coauthors who contributed 31 articles to the volume are D.A.S. Fraser, Douglas Wolfe, Ali Hadi, Joseph McKean, Bimal Sinha, Bikas Sinha, Sam Hedayat, Ibrahim Ahmad, Kung-Sik Chan, Malay Ghosh, Gauss Cordeirov, Glen Meeden, S. Jammalamadaka, Ayanendranath Basu, Leandro Pardo, and three others with whom Dr. Ali has jointly published most: Jungsoo Woo, Manisha Pal and Dale Umbach. The papers in the Special Volume can be viewed at http://www.pjsor.com/index.php/pjsor/issue/view/48/showToc.

Dr. Ali obtained BSc and MSc degrees from Dhaka University in 1956 and 1957, respectively. He obtained his second Master’s degree in 1967 and PhD degree in 1969, both in Mathematical Statistics at the University of Toronto. His major PhD thesis adviser was D.A.S. Fraser, with Ralph Wormleighton as co-supervisor and James Templeton as his external thesis examiner—all three of whom had, by coincidence, obtained their PhDs under Tukey at Princeton. Dr. Ali joined Ball State University in 1969 and founded the graduate program in statistics. He is a Fellow of several scholarly organizations including ASA, RSS and the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences, and is named Sagamore of the Wabash, the highest award of the state of Indiana, for his contribution to higher education in the State of Indiana, to Ball State University and to the statistics profession.

Academia Sinica elect Academicians

IMS Fellows Jianqing Fan (Princeton) and Ker-Chau Li (Academia Sinica and UCLA) were elected to Academicians of Academia Sinica (AS) during the 2012 July convocation of AS in Taipei. The AS Academician is considered to be a major honor and recognition for scholars of Chinese origin. They have joined the ranks of other Chinese statisticians, including Yuan-Shih Chow, George C. Tiao, Tze-Leung Lai, Chien-Fu Jeff Wu, Kung-Yee Liang, Ruey S. Tsay, and Wing H. Wong.

Honorary Doctorate for Ray Carroll

Raymond J. Carroll, distinguished professor of Statistics at Texas A&M University, received an honorary doctorate degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium for his fundamental contributions and international leadership in many areas of statistical research and practice. Professor Ingrid Van Keilegom of UCL gave the laudatio. The degree was presented May 31 in Louvain-la-Neuve by the Faculty of Sciences and the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Modeling and Quantitative Analysis (IMMAQ) as part of a joint 20-year-anniversary celebration for the UCL Institute of Statistics, Biostatistics and Actuarial Science (ISBA). Carroll was honored for distinction in his scientific career, and he delivered a presentation related to his research.

Norwood Award for Nancy Flournoy

Dr. Nancy Flournoy, University of Missouri College of Arts and Sciences, is the recipient of the 11th Annual Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the statistical sciences. She will accept the award at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Nancy’s research interests in theoretical and applied statistics include: clinical trials, adaptive sequential designs, transplantation biology and infectious disease, specifically cytomegalovirus at a key point prior to the AIDS epidemic. See https://www.uab.edu/soph/home/news-events/awards/other/janet-l-norwood-award

ASA’s First Annual Karl E. Peace Award

Dr. Fritz Scheuren and Dr. Marvin Zelen have been selected as the winners of the newly created Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society. See http://www.amstat.org/about/pressreleases/2012KarlEPeaceAwardRecipients.pdf

NISS Awards

NISS, the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, presented the 2012 Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research to William Q. Meeker, Iowa State University, at JSM. The award, in honor of founding director of NISS Jerry Sacks, was established in 2000. Meeker received the award for “out- standing sustained research that develops, implements, documents, communicates, and teaches statistics for the solution of relevant engineering and cross-disciplinary problems, especially in reliability, accelerated testing, reliability software, degradation data analysis, and statistical methods for nondestructive evaluation”. James Landwehr (Avaya Laboratories) and Linda Young (University of Florida) are this year’s recipients of the NISS Distinguished service Awards. Jim Landwehr was recognized for his many years of serving on the NISS Board, which include chairing it for three years and serving this past year as chair of the Board’s Affiliates Committee. Linda Young was acknowledged for her service on the Board and leadership role in the NISS-NASS research program, which ran from 2009 to 2011.

Left–right: Susan Ellenberg (chair of NISS Board), Jim Landwehr (Distinguished Service Award), William Meeker (Sacks Award recipient), Linda Young (Distinguished Service Award), Jerry Sacks (founding director), Alan Karr (director)