The American Statistical Association’s Boston Chapter awards the Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award to recognize a distinguished statistician who has made exceptional contributions to the statistics field through research, teaching, and service to the statistical community, including to the ASA Boston Chapter. Susan A. Murphy, Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and Computer Science and associate faculty at the Kempner Institute of Harvard University, was honored with the award this year. She was recognized for her groundbreaking research, which focuses on improving sequential decision-making in health—currently in online, real-time learning algorithms for developing personalized digital health interventions.

Murphy is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and US National Academy of Medicine (NAM). She is also a fellow of the college on problems in drug dependence. In 2013, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on experimental designs to inform sequential decision-making. She has impacted the real-world practice of clinical trials in medical and behavior science through her research, as well as through her efforts to promote adaptive interventions.

Murphy’s service to the professional community is equally commendable. Her leadership as the former president of both the IMS and the Bernoulli Society, former editor of the Annals of Statistics, and former chair of the NAM Interest Group on Health and Technology, highlights her longtime dedication to the field. She has served on many committees and review panels and trained a number of students and postdocs, many of whom are now faculty in leading statistics departments.

Murphy’s presentation at the award ceremony, titled “Online Reinforcement Learning in Digital Health Interventions,” showcased her research on developing data analytic methods, particularly online reinforcement learning methods, for personalized digital health interventions. She discussed two examples of clinical trials involving digital health care apps: HeartSteps and Oralytics. This talk illustrated how Murphy’s integration of artificial intelligence with statistical methods is transforming health care interventions and advancing its future.

Read more about the history of the Mosteller award, and about Fred Mosteller’s life and legacy, at https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2024/12/02/murphywins/.

[This article is abridged from the version in the December 2024 Amstat News.]