COPSS, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (IMS, ASA, SSC and 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.

The biannual George W. Snedecor Award honors an individual who was instrumental in the development of statistical theory in biometry. The 2013 Snedecor Award was presented to John David (Jack) Kalbfleisch, University of Michigan, “For foundational contribution to the field of biometry, especially for innovative analysis methods for failure time data, event history analysis, mixture models and likelihood theory. For influential collaborative research, especially in the area of solid organ transplantation. For exceptional mentoring of junior researchers, exemplary senior leadership of statistical groups, and steadfast service to the profession.”

The F. N. David Award recognizes a female statistician who exemplifies the contributions of Florence Nightingale David, an accomplished statistician in combinatorial probability theory. The 2013 F. N. David Award was presented to Lynne Billard, University of Georgia, “For her world-leading research in sequential analysis, stochastic processes, epidemiology and symbolic data analysis; for her extensive collaborations, especially in poultry science and computer science; for exceptional contributions to leadership in the profession; and for outstanding contributions as a role model, fostering opportunities especially for academic women as leaders, researchers, administrators, and educators.”

The COPSS Presidents’ Award goes annually to a young member of the statistical community in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. This year’s recipient is Marc A. Suchard, University of California, Los Angeles, “For extraordinarily wide-ranging and insightful contributions to the statistical sciences in the areas of Bayesian inference, computation and stochastic processes; for innovative statistical modeling and novel computational techniques for formerly intractable problems in molecular epidemiology, evolutionary medicine, phylogenetics, phylogeography, computational biology and emerging massive public health data sets; for a panoply of flexible, well-regarded and widely used statistical software tools for the applied sciences; for extensive and creative statistical applications across an impressive range of human inquiry; and for service to the profession 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 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 exceptional training and mentoring of students, leadership of professional societies, and leadership of his academic department.”