Each year, the ASA recognizes all members reaching a milestone of 35, 40, 45, and 50 years of membership. All members who joined 35 years ago or more are also extended an invitation to a reception at the annual Joint Statistical Meetings.

The National Institute of Justice is the scientific research, development, and evaluation agency of the US Department of Justice. Each year, NIJ identifies needed topical research in the physical and social sciences, solicits proposals from universities and other research institutions to conduct that research, and awards grants to fund the selected proposals.

The symposium, which can be attended in person or virtually, will take place June 10–11 at the Northeastern University campus in Boston with the theme Generative AI in Medical Research and Drug Development: Hype or Reality?

Chris Franck met Dean Follmann during a visit to the Biostatistics Research Branch of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He grew curious to learn more about Dean, who leads the group, and conducted this featured interview about his work.

ASA President Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar’s April column focuses on mentoring—both her own experience of being mentored and the ASA’s focus on mentoring programs.

The Survey Research Methods Section is sponsoring the course Data Integration in Surveys and Clinical Trials: Methods and Software at the 2024 Joint Statistical Meetings.

The onset of COVID-19 had a direct and continuing impact on the educational sector, with institutions, instructors, students, and parents scrambling to adapt to a variety of online or hybrid educational models. The April issue of the open-access Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education leads with three papers that describe approaches to teaching during the pandemic.

Each year in April, Earth Day offers an opportunity to refocus on protecting this planet we share with all living things. This year, David Corliss focuses on opportunities to address one of the most pressing challenges facing us today: mass extinction.

The Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research is awarded annually by INFORMS to recognize and reward quality and coherence of analysis used in practice.

Awarded jointly by the ASA’s Government Statistics and Social Statistics sections, this scholarship encourages promising young statisticians to consider a career in government statistics.

The nearly five-hour program kicked off with opening remarks from ASA Executive Director Ron Wasserstein and 2023 section chair Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel and included a keynote speech, data jamboree, lighting talks, and panel discussion.

Annually, the Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences Section offers the Young Investigator Award, Outstanding Teaching Award, Distinguished Achievement Award, and Best Contributed Paper at JSM Award. Nominations are currently open for the first three.

ASA members Bin Yu of UC Berkeley and Rebecca Barter of Utah University Medical School recently released the open-access version of their new book, Veridical Data Science: The Practice of Responsible Data Analysis and Decision Making.

To celebrate MSAM 2024’s theme of Looking to the Past to Predict the Future, the American Statistical Association created a poster and related infographic for teachers to use in their classrooms, hosted a Predict 5 contest, and will host its virtual K-12 science fair.

Mark Daniel Ward, statistics professor at Purdue and executive director of The Data Mine, loves working with the American Statistical Association. He says, “I am always looking for new ways to contribute to the ASA’s broad reach and impact.” Take a look at his ASA story to learn how he contributes.

Organized by the Brazilian Chapter of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis, the 7th Latin American Meeting on Bayesian Statistics will be held at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, December 2–6. This is a joint event with the 17th Brazilian Meeting on Bayesian Statistics.

In honor of April being both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, The University of Texas at El Paso’s Larry Lesser composed the following poems in the quirky form known as clerihew.

Are you an early-career statistician or data scientist with a talent for telling data-driven stories in an entertaining and thought-provoking way? If so, enter the competition for the 2024 Statistical Excellence Award for Early-Career Writing.

To strengthen the connection between the statistical community and National Science Foundation, we continue the series introduced in May 2023 that poses questions to NSF program officers and awardees.

The Conference on Statistical Practice in February included a panel session on data-driven leadership featuring Kimberly Sellers from North Carolina State University and Talithia Williams from Harvey Mudd College, two outstanding African American female leaders in statistical science.

Editors of the Journal of the American Statistical Association are seeking papers for a special issue dedicated to exploring the intersection of statistical theory, methods, and applications with core problems in artificial intelligence.

With significant ASA membership coming from industry, the Caucus of Industry Representatives seeks to provide a forum for surfacing issues related to industry statisticians and data scientists, as well as to facilitate interaction between industry leaders in much the same way as the Caucus of Academic Representatives serves the academic community. See what the caucus has accomplished in its first year.

Christophe Toukam Tchakoute grew up in Cameroon during the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is how he became interested in STEM. His interest was reinforced when he attended the University of Cape Town in South Africa and became curious about the chemistry and cell biology of HIV and how the virus can hijack the immune system for its own benefit. Consequently, he interned in the HIV/AIDS department at the World Health Organization and was introduced to epidemiology and biostatistics. He now works at Genentech and leverages statistics and real-world data to inform clinical trial design for different oncology programs.

Lloyd Edwards earned a master’s in mathematical statistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1982 and then worked for TRW Defense Systems for three years as a software engineer focusing on antisubmarine warfare. He graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990 with a PhD in biostatistics, leading to a career as a faculty member in the University of North Carolina Department of Biostatistics for close to 25 years. Since 2017, Edwards has been a professor in the department of biostatistics in the school of public health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Horton was recognized for his numerous innovative contributions to statistics and data science education and his significant participation in regional statistics activities for more than 25 years.

Chandra Erdman started college at 15 and earned her first degree in mathematics by 20. Eventually, she become the first Black person to earn a PhD in statistics from Yale University.