Emmanuel Candès

ASA member Emmanuel Candès recently was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A total of 204 new members were invited to join the prestigious honorary society, which is a leading center for independent policy research. New members are among the world’s most accomplished scholars; scientists; writers; artists; and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders. Visit the American Academy of Arts and Sciences website for details.

Christopher R. Genovese

Carnegie Mellon University has selected Christopher R. Genovese to head its department of statistics, effective July 1. Genovese, professor of statistics, succeeds Mark Schervish, who served as department head for the past 10 years.

“The department of statistics is central to several of Carnegie Mellon’s major strategic initiatives, which also reflect many of the central problems facing the world today—data science, brain science, learning science, cybersecurity and privacy, computational biology, genetics, and cosmology,” said John Lehoczky, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Chris Genovese is a truly brilliant applied and theoretical statistician who is ideally suited to lead the department at a time when statistical science is rapidly evolving to meet the challenging demands of Big Data and a wide array of scientific problems. Under his leadership, I am confident that the department will continue its international prominence.”

Genovese joined Carnegie Mellon in 1994. His research focuses on solving complex and high-dimensional problems in the sciences. His work has produced new methods and results in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, learning science, and cosmology/astrophysics.

Genovese’s paper introducing a Bayesian model for the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data was awarded application paper of the year by the American Statistical Association. He uses data from large-scale astronomical surveys to understand the evolution and history of the universe. He also helped build Carnegie Mellon’s astrostatistics group, an international leader in the application of statistics to observational cosmology.

Genovese’s work in the learning sciences focuses on modeling students’ learning state from data collected as the students interact with online instruction. He is the co-creator of the “Learning Dashboard,” a system that analyzes student data in real time and provides interpretable and actionable inferences, recommendations, and data visualizations for students and instructors. He also does theoretical work in a variety of areas, including finding low-dimensional structures in high-dimensional data and combining many statistical tests into a single coherent decision.

Genovese is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He has been awarded funding from numerous agencies, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NASA, and U.S. Department of Energy. He is a recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and a Shannon Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Genovese also has been active as an educator, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He has created several courses and consistently innovated in instructional design. For more information, visit the CMU website.

Michael Hamada

The Quality and Productivity (Q&P) Section has selected Michael Hamada as the first recipient of its Gerald J. Hahn Q&P Achievement Award. The award will be presented at the 2014 Fall Technical Conference of the Q&P and Physical and Engineering Sciences sections of ASA and the Chemical and Process Industries and Statistics Divisions of the American Society for Quality, to be held in Richmond, Virginia, October 2–3. As winner of the award, Hamada will deliver the Q&P-sponsored plenary address.

This award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated outstanding and sustained achievement and leadership in developing, promoting, and successfully improving the quality and productivity of products and organizational performance using statistical concepts and methods over a period of 20 or more years.

Hamada’s selection was based upon his extensive contributions to quality and productivity motivated by real-world problems. Blending his insights gained from experience in government, industry, and academic settings, he has spent the bulk of his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory developing statistical solutions for problems of national and international importance while advancing the state of knowledge in quality and productivity. Always emphasizing the science behind problems and the understanding of measurement processes, he has made contributions to reliability, design of experiments, process monitoring, quality improvement, measurement systems, tolerance intervals, sampling, simulation, and uncertainty quantification.

Hamada is known for his ability to look at a variety of problems, distilling the statistical essence, and carefully working out details to provide innovative, practical solutions. He has worked tirelessly to communicate these novel methods to a broad audience of theoretical statisticians and statistical practitioners, persuading peers in other disciplines and sharing the pivotal role statistics can play in improving engineering and scientific discovery.

Hamada has been a leader in the broader statistics community with more than 100 scholarly articles, leading books on design of experiments and Bayesian reliability, extensive editorial service, and organization of conferences and workshops. A respected colleague, a dedicated mentor, and an active collaborator both within his organization and with external colleagues in academic and industrial settings, Hamada exemplifies the qualities recognized by the Gerald J. Hahn Q&P Achievement Award.

More information about the award can be found on the ASA Community website.