Ming Li, who is the chair of the committee for the ASA’s Statistics in Physical Engineering Sciences (SPES) Award, writes:

We received seven nominations for the SPES Award this year. The SPES Award Committee reviewed the nomination letters and support materials and chose the winner for this year to be Jonathan Stallrich (North Carolina State University), Nazmul Islam (UnitedHealth Group), Ana-Maria Staicu (North Carolina State University), Dustin Crouch (University of Tennessee), Lizhi Pan (Tianjin University) and He Huang (North Carolina State University) for their joint work to develop a prosthesis controller that is more directly tied to known biomechanical movement models that require data from a sparse set of EMG sensors. Their paper, entitled “Optimal EMG Placement for a Robotic Prosthesis Controller with Sequential, Adaptive Functional Estimation (SAFE)”, was published last year in Annals of Applied Statistics (Volume 14, No. 3, page 1164-1181). Congratulation to our SPES Award Winners!