Ying Hung receives 2014 Tweedie Award

The Institute of Mathematical Statistics has selected Ying Hung as the winner of this year’s Tweedie New Researcher Award. Ying received her PhD in 2008 from Georgia Institute of Technology, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and Biostatistics at Rutgers.

The IMS Travel Awards Committee, selected Ying, “for her outstanding contributions to design and analysis of computer experiments and statistical analysis with applications in cell biology.”

The IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award will fund Dr. Hung’s travel to present the Tweedie New Researcher Invited Lecture at the IMS New Researchers’ Conference, held this year in Boston in August.

American Association for Advancement of Science elects new Fellows

The theme for the 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting was Meeting Global Challenges: Discovery and Innovation—which also neatly describes the achievements of the 388 newly announced AAAS Fellows. Among them were six IMS members and Fellows.

Philip Protter, Columbia University, was elected in the AAAS Section on Mathematics. In the Section on Statistics were Raymond J. Carroll, Texas A&M University, Keith N. Crank, retired, Bani K. Mallick, Texas A&M University, Robert T. Smythe, Oregon State University, and Michael Stein, University of Chicago.

The new AAAS Fellows who were recognized by their peers for their efforts to advance science or its applications. The new AAAS Fellows, whose names will be published in the 29 November issue of Science, were honored at the AAAS Fellows Forum on Saturday, 15 February during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago, where they received a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.

The complete list of new AAAS Fellows is here.

Stephen Fienberg on Forensic Commission

IMS Fellow Stephen Fienberg (Carnegie Mellon University) was appointed in January to the newly created US National Commission on Forensic Science by the US Department of Justice and National Institute of Standards and Technology. Fienberg and other commission members will work to improve the practice of forensic science by developing guidance concerning intersections between forensic science and the criminal justice system.

Alexandre Tsybakov’s Humboldt Award

IMS Fellow Alexandre Tsybakov, a faculty member of the CNRS Groupe de Recherche en Economie et Statistique, has been elected the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award. He was nominated for this award by Professor Enno Mammen, Universität Mannheim, Germany. The award is conferred in recognition of lifetime achievements in research. In addition, award winners are invited to carry out research projects of their choice in cooperation with specialist colleagues in Germany; the aim is to further promote international scientific cooperation. See http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/programmes-by-target-group.html

Gang Zheng: 1965–2014

Gang Zheng lost his battle with head and neck cancer on January 9, 2014. He was 48. Gang earned his BS from Fudan University in Shanghai, and moved to work in the US in 1994, earning a master’s in mathematics at Michigan Tech (1996) and PhD in statistics at The George Washington University (2000). He then joined the National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute, where he worked until his death. His colleagues Nancy Geller, Colin Wu, and Michael Lauer remember him as a “prolific and versatile statistician” whose “efficiency, creativity and generosity were truly inspiring,” in an Amstat News obituary at magazine.amstat.org/blog/2014/03/01/obituaries-03-2014/