The ASA celebrates its 175th anniversary this year. Column “175”—written by members of the ASA’s 175th Anniversary Steering Committee and other ASA members—will chronicle the theme chosen for the celebration, status of preparations, activities to take place, and, best yet, how you can get involved in propelling the ASA toward its bicentennial.

Contributing Editors
Jeff Myers joined the ASA in July 2012. He possesses 28 years’ experience as a communications professional in branding; public, media, and member relations; strategic planning; and consumer advertising. He is responsible for increasing the public profile of the ASA and its members.

Ron Wasserstein is the ASA’s executive director and president of Kappa Mu Epsilon National Mathematics Honor Society. Previously, he was vice president for academic affairs at Washburn University.

With the big celebrations of the ASA’s 175th anniversary behind us, it’s only natural to ponder what the 25 years leading up to the association’s bicentennial will hold for statistical science. To get a glimpse of that future, we asked a group of ASA members and others in statistics to peer into their crystal balls and offer a projection. Prognosticators ranged from established statisticians to college students excited about their coming careers. Here’s what they predicted:
Broadly, most prognosticators talked about the growth of data and the need for statisticians to find meaning from it.

“The dramatic surge in the complexity and volume of data, the increased power of modern computing systems, the new focus on evidence-based decisions, and a growing need to make sense of the information that is around us will ensure a vibrant future,” says Nick Horton, an ASA Board member and professor of statistics at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

“Our profession has a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate our unique value in this challenging era of Big Data and data analytics. The world is awash in a sea of data from which information must be extracted, if global leaders are to make sound decisions,” says ASA President-elect David Morganstein, who challenged statisticians to “step up to the task!”

Genevera Allen, an assistant professor at Rice University, echoes the ASA’s Big Tent theme in her prediction: “As the breadth of data expands, so too should our definition of ‘statistics.’ Our community should be inclusive, broaden our reach, and embrace all involved with Big Data, data science, machine learning, and data-rich domains.”

Geert Molenberghs, a biostatistics professor at Hasselt University and the University of Leuven in Belgium, foresees a new direction for educating tomorrow’s statisticians: “Statistics is increasingly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, presenting challenges for education. We must equip the next generation of graduate statisticians with lifelong learning strategies—technical and substantive, train communication and interpersonal skill, strengthen the mathematical and statistical curriculum of secondary schools, take outreach very seriously, and foster international collaboration.”

Many of the key skills used by statisticians today will carry over to the future, says Oregon State University PhD student Heather Hisako Kitada: “Although the ubiquity of data collection will increase the demand for statisticians and the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, good statistical analysis will continue to require creative problemsolving skills, critical thinking, and the ability to effectively communicate to diverse audiences.”

Sarah Hale, a fifth-year graduate student at North Carolina State University (NCSU), predicts a bigger future role for the ASA. “Recent advances in data-collection technologies have pushed statistics to a data-driven mentality. Statistical theory and methodology are evolving in order to analyze and interpret such large and complex data sets. In this new ‘Big Data’ era, the ASA will need to actively support and promote the proper generic ativan prescription application of statistics.”

Statisticians who learn to communicate and collaborate with nonstatisticians will stand out in the future, says Eric Vance, the director of Virginia Tech’s Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis. “Statisticians who learn how to be effective collaborators will have increasing impact in a world increasingly in need of people who can make sense out of data.”

FiveThirtyEight.com data-journalist Carl Bialik says there will be no change in the longstanding risk of making incorrect predictions, including the statistical profession. However, he predicts there will be an “expansion in the number of practitioners, in their credentials and in the scope of fields they study; in the range of approaches they employ; and in the size of data sets they analyze; and a shift in emphasis toward tools that grapple with big data sets and identify questions no one thought to ask.”

University of Alabama Professor of Applied Statistics Jim Cochran believes there will be a worldwide awakening to the power of statistics and the role of statisticians in addressing and resolving societal problems, especially among governments and nongovernmental organizations in developing countries. “Through statistics, suffering is being relieved, prospects for quality of life are improving and, most importantly, hope is replacing despair. What other discipline can say that about itself?”

The need for specialists with deep understanding of fundamental statistical principles who can function effectively on interdisciplinary teams will continue, says Miami University Distinguished Professor and Statistics Department Chair John Bailer. “New supplementary computing skills will be needed as real-time, automatic data collection becomes the norm. The ASA will be the advocate for development of these skills and the promotion of the participation of statisticians in this future.”

Milo Page, a first-year PhD candidate at NCSU, says the “outlook is great” and praises the ASA for its promotion of the field. “The demand for computationally oriented statisticians is deservingly high as research, government, and businesses attempt to utilize the abundance of data. The ASA is adapting well, too, in particular by actively and creatively promoting statistics to the next generation.”

“Bullish with a catch,” is how Debashis Ghosh, professor and chair of the department of biostatistics and informatics at Colorado School of Public Health in Aurora, describes his outlook. “The future is rife with increasingly sophisticated methods of real-time data collection and analysis in every discipline, which screams for the help and engagement of statisticians and the ASA. The catch? As statisticians, we will have a responsibility to educate the public on what this all means.”

Meanwhile, Sherri Rose, an assistant professor at Harvard, predicts statistics will continue its integration into substantive fields, with new theory and methodology having tremendous impact on scientific questions in many domains. “This will involve traversing the influx of huge data streams using new computational tools in collaborations across a spectrum of scientific areas, including computer science, biology, and medicine.”

We end with a picture painted by Dionne Price, director of the Division of Biometrics IV in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, that speaks to the need for recruiting the very statisticians who will be leading the ASA and the field and celebrating the 200th anniversary of the association in 2039: “A 12-year-old is asked, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ The response is, ‘a statistician.’ This scenario can become a reality through communication and education focused on greater exposure of the profession and increased promotion of the impact of statistics in all walks of life.”