IMS Fellows announced

We announce the class of new IMS Fellows for 2014, who will be presented at the IMS Presidential Address and Awards session at the IMS-ASC meeting in Sydney. They are: Rami Atar, F. Jay Breidt, Alexander Goldenshluger, Thomas C.M. Lee, Richard A. Lockhart, Bin Nan, Richard Samworth, Martin Wainwright, and Harrison H. Zhou. You can read the new Fellows’ citations here.

Christopher Genovese heads Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Statistics

IMS Fellow Christopher R. Genovese has been selected by Carnegie Mellon University to head its Department of Statistics, succeeding Mark Schervish, who served as department head for 10 years. John Lehoczky, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said that Chris Genovese “is a truly brilliant applied and theoretical statistician who is ideally suited to lead the department at a time when statistical science is rapidly evolving to meet the challenging demands of Big Data and a wide array of scientific problems. Under his leadership, I am confident that the department will continue its international prominence.”

Chris joined Carnegie Mellon in 1994. His research focuses on solving complex and high-dimensional problems in the sciences, which has produced new methods and results in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, learning science, and cosmology/astrophysics.

Chris Genovese is a fellow of IMS and ASA. He has been awarded funding from numerous agencies, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NASA, and U.S. Department of Energy. He is a recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and a Shannon Award from the National Institutes of Health.

H.N. Nagaraja honored at conference

“Ordered Data Analysis, Models, and Health Research Methods: An International Conference in Honor of H.N. Nagaraja for his 60th Birthday” was held at the University of Texas at Dallas March 7–9. In a report in Amstat News, Pankaj Choudhary, Chaitra Nagaraja and Tony Ng said that H.N. Nagaraja “began his academic career in the department of statistics at The Ohio State University in 1980 and is now the biostatistics division chair in the college of public health there. He has made distinguished contributions in areas such as order statistics, stochastic modeling, distribution theory, characterizations, asymptotics, and statistical methods in the health sciences. He is a fellow of both the American Statistical Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science. The conference featured three plenary talks: “Ordering Order Statistics” by N. Balakrishnan of McMaster University; “Data, Design, and Analysis for Comparative Effectiveness Research Decisions” by Sally C. Morton of the University of Pittsburgh; and “Variations on Some Exponential Characterization Themes” by Barry Arnold of the University of California at Riverside. Nearly 200 participants from 14 countries representing academia, industry, and government attended. There were 46 sessions, more than 120 talks, 11 posters, and a SAS JMP workshop. Many students and young statisticians, including the 11 winners of travel awards sponsored by The Ohio State University, were involved.” For more information, visit http://faculty.smu.edu/ngh/hnnconf.html