People News for August 2012
Royal Statistical Society Toasts Queen
Bruce Lindsay
Bruce Lindsay, Willaman Professor of Statistics and head of the department of statistics at Penn State University, was recently appointed as holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics, one of the highest honors awarded to faculty members in Penn State’s Eberly College of Science. The appointment was made by the Office of the President of the University based on the recommendations of colleagues and the dean in recognition of Lindsay’s national and international reputation for excellence in research and teaching.
Lindsay also has played a leading role in the creation of the nation’s policy regarding statistical data. In 2002, he was chair of the National Science Foundation Workshop on the Future of Statistics and served as one of the co-editors of the resulting advisory report to the National Science Foundation. From 1995 to 1997, he served on the National Research Council Committee on Fish Stock Assessment Methods.
Lindsay has supervised 30 PhD degree recipients during his time at Penn State and was honored in 1998 by the university chapter of the scientific research society, Sigma Xi. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1987 and the American Statistical Association in 1998. He was the 2010 Fisher Lecturer.
Bin Yu
Bin Yu has been selected as president-elect of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). She will serve a three-year term—one year as president-elect (2012–2013), one year as president (2013–2014), and one year as past-president (2014–2015).
Yu is a professor and chair of the department of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a founding co-director of the Microsoft Statistics and Information Technology Laboratory of Peking University in Beijing, China. Previously, she was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; visiting professor at Yale, ETH, INRIA, and the Poincare Institute; and a member of the technical staff in the math center at Bell Labs. Her major research interests include statistical inference, machine learning, information theory, data problems from remote sensing and atmospheric science, networks, neuroscience, and text documents. Jointly with others, she holds three U.S. patents: time-varying network tomography, combined LMS prediction for lossless compression of audio signals, and approximation lasso methods for language modeling.
Yu has published more than 70 papers in refereed journals, as well as more than 30 refereed conference papers and book chapters. Yu is the action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning and an associate editor for Technometrics, Sankhya, and Statistics Survey. She has served as an associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Statistics, and Statistica Sinica.
During the 8th World Congress in Probability and Statistics (the quadrennial joint conference of the Bernoulli Society and IMS) in July, Yu delivered the 2012 Tukey Memorial Lecture in Statistics. The Tukey Lecturer is one of the highest academic honors on a statistician bestowed by the Bernoulli Society.
Yu earned her BS in mathematics from Peking University in 1984 and her MA and PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley in 1987 and 1990, respectively. She was a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the ASA, IMS, IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Visit the IMS website for a complete list of election results.