Bhramar Mukherjee, Yan Li, and Rebecca Steorts

Graduate students and junior collaborators gather to celebrate Malay Ghosh’s 70th birthday during a conference at the University of Maryland, College Park.

A conference in honor of Malay Ghosh, titled “Frontiers of Hierarchical Modeling in Observational Studies, Complex Surveys, and Big Data,” was hosted by the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM), University of Maryland at College Park, May 29–31 at the College Park Marriott Hotel and Conference Center. More than 200 people celebrated Ghosh’s outstanding contributions to statistics and his dedicated role as a teacher and mentor.

Several areas to which Ghosh made substantial contributions were represented, including small-area estimation, objective Bayesian inference, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, and statistical inference for case-control studies. There were nine plenary, seven invited, two contributed, and one poster session during the three-day conference.

The conference started off with a welcoming reception. The scientific program began the following morning with remarks by the director of JPSM, Fred Conrad, and the two head organizers, Partha Lahiri and Gauri S. Datta, both former PhD students of Ghosh. The day continued with presentations by several of Malay’s doctoral students and other eminent scholars, including Ghosh’s dissertation advisor, Pranab K. Sen. J.N.K. Rao also presented current trends in small-area estimation, followed by discussions from Graham Kalton and Danny Pfeffermann. Highlights of the day included a luncheon for students and young researchers, a plenary session with three-minute speed oral presentations by poster presenters, and a two-hour poster session by students and young researchers.

The next day opened with a panel discussion on Bayesian model uncertainty by James Berger, Mike Daniels, Edward George, Jayanta K. Ghosh, and Brunero Liseo. Following this was a plenary session, titled “Future of Bayesian Methods in Sample Surveys,” by Roderick J. A. Little and Joseph Sedransk with a discussion by Alan Dorfman.

Saturday morning featured a rich discussion on integrated likelihood, profile likelihood, and various associated variants and their subtle properties by Thomas Severini, Nancy Reid, Donald Fraser, and Judith Rousseau. There were several other outstanding plenary lectures and discussions by Sanat Sarkar, Xihong Lin, Bimal Sinha, Gauri S. Datta, Thomas Louis, Partha Lahiri, Carl Morris, James Zidek, Bradley Carlin, and Glen Meeden. The quality of the scientific program was uniformly strong and featured both Bayesian and frequentist work.

The banquet on Friday night, anchored by Edward George and Rebecca Steorts, featured tributes from many of Ghosh’s colleagues, students, and mentees. Opening remarks were given by Ghosh’s son, Debashis Ghosh, a distinguished statistician himself. Other speakers for the banquet included J.N.K. Rao, Pranab K. Sen, Glen Meeden, Tom Louis, Ralf Muennich, Isabela Molina, Rebecca Steorts, Bhramar Mukherjee, and Shibashis Dasgupta. The evening ended with a touching speech by Ghosh, who shared his broad view on the changing landscape of statistics over time and thanked his professors in India and abroad, as well as his students, collaborators, and family. Ghosh’s wife, Dola, and his younger son, Debadyuti, also were present.

Ghosh supervised 49 doctoral students during his career; 16 were at the conference, with some traveling internationally. The conference was a fitting tribute to Ghosh’s numerous contributions to the profession and, in particular, allowed many to celebrate the legacy he has created in terms of his research and mentoring.