Dipak Dey writes:

The Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut hosted the 30th Distinguished Statistician Colloquium, sponsored by ASA, Pfizer and UConn. The Pfizer colloquium series ran from 1978 until 2012, and was renewed in 2018. The colloquium series has featured C. R. Rao, Bradley Efron, D.R. Cox, Grace Wahba and many more. For a complete list, see https://statistics.uconn.edu/pfizer-colloquium/. The purpose of the Colloquium is to provide a forum for a distinguished statistician to share and disseminate their unique perspective and work in the theory and/or application of statistics. Starting from 2018, the series has been co-sponsored by Pfizer, the American Statistical Association, and the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut.

This year’s speaker was Dr. Nancy Reid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Reid), Professor at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory. Professor Reid gave a presentation entitled, “When Likelihood goes wrong,” under the auspices of the Pfizer Colloquia by Distinguished Statisticians in Honor of Dr. David S. Salsburg. The abstract read: “Inference based on the likelihood function is the workhorse of statistics, and constructing the likelihood function is often the first step in any detailed analysis, even for very complex data. At the same time, statistical theory tells us that ‘black-box’ use of likelihood inference can be very sensitive to the dimension of the parameter space, the structure of the parameter space, and any measurement error in the data. This has been recognized for a long time, and many alternative approaches have been suggested with a view to preserving some of the virtues of likelihood inference while ameliorating some of the difficulties. In this talk I will discuss some of the ways that likelihood inference can go wrong, and some of the potential remedies, with particular emphasis on model misspecification.”

Following the lecture was a “Conversation with Distinguished Statisticians in Memory of Professor Harry O. Posten”. This Discussion with Professor Reid was led by Heather Battey, Reader in the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, and Ana-Maria Staicu, Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University.

The 2023 speaker, at the 29th Colloquium, was Dr. James O. Berger, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Statistics at Duke University. Professor Jim Berger gave a presentation entitled, “Frequentist and/or Bayesian adjustment for multiple testing,” under the auspices of the Pfizer Colloquia by Distinguished Statisticians in Honor of Dr. David S. Salsburg. Following the lecture was a “Conversation with Distinguished Statisticians in Memory of Professor Harry O. Posten”. This discussion with Professor Berger was led by Dr. Dipak Dey, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor; Dr. Ming-Hui Chen, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor; and Dr. Xiaojing Wang, Associate Professor, all from the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. We thank Pfizer and the ASA for their generous financial support. We also thank the members of the selection committee: Dan Meyer and Demissie Alemayehu from Pfizer, Ron Wasserstein and Nancy Flournoy from the ASA, and Dipak Dey (Chair), Joseph Glaz and Ming-Hui Chen from UConn. Professor Chen also represents the New England Statistical Society (NESS). We also thank our staff and student volunteers for their continuous help for the great success of the event.

You can watch a recording of Jim Berger’s 2023 lecture on the Amstat Videos YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gtd9-wjbBQ. His “Conversation” interview is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7v1c8ANZh0. The recordings of the 2024 Pfizer Colloquium speaker Nancy Reid will be online soon.

We thank Pfizer and the ASA for their generous financial support.