Winson Tam, SPES Chair

Thanks to all its volunteers, the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) had a wonderful 2013. SPES offered a variety of services to its nearly 700 members. It sponsored a number of conferences and webinars and an industrial speaker program. It also recognized achievements among its ranks with awards and scholarships.

As the ASA started using communities to network its members, SPES decided to align its main website with a SPES microsite, which now serves as a single entry point to all SPES-related information. It has the look and feel of all other community sites within the ASA. You could sign in to SPES-associated communities through this microsite. Thanks to the tireless effort of our webmaster.

The Spring Research Conference (SRC) was held at the University of California at Los Angeles. The Fall Technical Conference (FTC) was held in San Antonio, Texas. Both conferences were well attended and had many innovative topics to highlight our members’ technical accomplishments. SPES sponsored these conferences to build a community of industrial statisticians working in various physical and engineering science fields. SPES sponsored several student scholarships at SRC and a number of short courses at FTC. Marie Davidian, ASA past-president, gave a talk titled “Achieving Personalized Medicine: An Introduction to Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regime” to encourage cross-discipline dialog about methods used in medical research and engineering applications.

SPES was well represented at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Montréal. The joint mixer with the Quality and Productivity Section was a great success with an endless supply of door prizes donated by various individuals and corporations. They are too many to name here, but look for other SPES news regarding that. During the mixer, this year’s Technometrics Ziegler Prize was awarded to Bradley Jones and Peter Goos for their book, Optimal Design of Experiments: A Case Study Approach.

We can’t thank Stephanie DeHart enough for securing funds from DuPont to sponsor this year’s Statistics in Chemistry Award, which was given out at the JSM awards ceremony. Members of the SPES executive committee just voted to adopt the proposals put forward by the Chemometric Award Committee to transition the Statistics in Chemistry Award to the Statistics in Physical and Engineering Science Award in 2015.

Regarding conferences, a volunteered web survey was conducted to get a sense of how frequent our membership attended SPES-sponsored conferences in the past five years. Among those who responded to the survey, the majority did not attend SRC, FTC, and webinars. Most attended JSM. This study helped SPES to explore other services for its membership.

In addition to various community-building activities such as conferences and continuing education programs (webinars and short courses), SPES also nominated members to become ASA Fellows. SPES was successful in doing so in 2013 for William Brenneman, who contributed extensively to industrial experiments and advancing decisionmaking processes with data. I would like to extend our congratulations to SPES members William Guthrie, William Li, Shane Reese, and Ananda Sen for becoming ASA Fellows in 2013.

All these activities could not be accomplished without the dedication and effort put forth by SPES officers. If you have a chance, please reach out to them at the SPES website and thank them for their time and talent. Speaking of officers, I would like to welcome the newly elected officers for 2014: Stephanie DeHart (chair-elect), William Li (JSM program chair-elect), and Peter Hovey (treasurer).

I would like to thank all of you for supporting SPES and making my job so much easier. I look forward to more exciting activities and events form SPES in the coming months.