This year’s Joint Statistical Meetings, which took place this past August in Boston, Massachusetts, was particularly special because the ASA celebrated its 175th anniversary. There were special events, a slew of activities, and a few firsts. To top it off, it was the largest meeting in JSM history, with 6,809 in attendance.

On Tuesday, right after the president’s address, the ASA celebrated its 175th anniversary with a party that included a champagne toast, birthday cake, and talent show. The talent show and competition to honor the study and practice of statistics creatively featured four acts: Almost Shirley, The Imposteriors, Fifth Moment Band and Jami Jackson. All four acts had us dancing in the aisles, so they each won the grand prize package of a one-year ASA membership, JSM T-shirt, and $20 give certificate to the ASA Marketplace.

In addition to the celebrations, there were a few firsts, including Sharon Lohr—who became the first woman to give the Deming Lecture—a downloadable app, and a photo scavenger hunt.

To view the plenary session webcasts, visit the ASA meetings website.

For those who were unable to attend or missed some of the activities, here are a few photos and highlights.

Highlighting the Joint Statistical Meetings was the ASA Presidential Address and Founders and Fellows Recognition, during which the Founders Award winners were announced and 63 new ASA Fellows were officially inducted. Congratulations to all.

President Nathaniel Schenker presented the Founders Award to James J. Cochran, Christine A. Franklin, and Sastry G. Pantula. “The ASA and all of its members around the world are deeply indebted to Jim, Christine, and Sastry for their invaluable contributions to the advancement of the association, its mission, and the field of statistical science,” said Schenker. “It is a personal privilege for me to acknowledge the unwavering commitment and dedication of these great leaders by presenting each the 2014 ASA Founders Award.”

The citations for each 2014 Founders Award honoree follow:

James J. Cochran, Louisiana Tech University, for his vision for international outreach expressed through the creation of Statistics Without Borders and the Friends of Australasia; for his leadership of the ASA Section on Statistics in Sports; for his commitment and service to both the Council of Sections and the Council of Chapters; for his service on ASA committees; for representing our profession and association well in a variety of other endeavors; and for taking on all these responsibilities with enthusiasm and good grace.

Christine A. Franklin, University of Georgia, for her outstanding leadership and efforts in curricular development and teaching statistics; for her research, leadership, and professional service in helping to grow the field of statistics education; for chairing the ASA-sponsored strategic initiative titled “Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education”; and for chairing and participating in numerous committees devoted to statistics education, including the ASA Statistical Education Section, ASA Advisory Committee on Teacher Enhancement, ASA-sponsored strategic initiative “Statistical Education of Teachers,” ASA-National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Joint Committee on Curriculum in Statistics and Probability, and the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education.

Sastry G. Pantula, Oregon State University, for bold, sustained, and visionary leadership of the statistics profession in many different capacities: as an architect and steward of the success of the department of statistics at North Carolina State University; as the president of the ASA in 2010, with signal achievements in raising the visibility and impact of our field and numerous other contributions to the association; as the first statistician to serve as director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation; and as a dean at Oregon State University, nurturing a new wave of collaborative interdisciplinary statistical science.

Sixty-three ASA members received the honor of Fellow in 2014.

Each year, ASA Fellows are nominated by the membership and selected by the ASA Committee on Fellows, chaired this year by Katherine L. Monti. The number of Fellows named is limited to no more than one-third of 1% of the active ASA member total. The following 63 ASA Fellows were inducted this year:

Deepak Agarwal, LinkedIn Corporation
Patrick Ball, Human Rights Data Analysis Group
Sanjib Basu, Northern Illinois University
Nancy Bates, U.S. Census Bureau
Johnny Blair, Independent Consultant
Brian Scott Caffo, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Catherine A. Calder, The Ohio State University
Joseph E. Cavanaugh, The University of Iowa
Aloka G. Chakravarty, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Jie Chen, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Ying-Kuen Ken Cheung, Columbia University
Jeng-Min Chiou, Academia Sinica
Bertrand Salem Clarke, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Ciprian M. Crainiceanu, The Johns Hopkins University
Holger Dette, Ruhr-University Bochum
Ronald J. M. M. Does, University of Amsterdam
Lynn Elizabeth Eberly, University of Minnesota
Paul Embrechts, ETH Zurich
A. Richard Entsuah, Merck Research Laboratories
Felix Famoye, Central Michigan University
Paul Gallo, Novartis
Martha M. Gardner, General Electric Global Research
Yulia R. Gel, The University of Texas at Dallas and University of Waterloo
Peter Brian Gilbert, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington
Mark E. Glickman, Boston University School of Public Health
Heike Hofmann, Iowa State University
Scott H. Holan, University of Missouri
Shelley Hurwitz, Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital
Lurdes Yoshiko Tani Inoue, University of Washington
Qi Jiang, Amgen
Amarjot Kaur, Merck
Harry J. Khamis, Wright State University
Mimi Y. Kim, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Frauke Kreuter, JPSM University of Maryland, IAB & LMU
Karunarathna Bandara Kulasekera, University of Louisville
Purushottam W. (Prakash) Laud, Medical College of Wisconsin
Nicole Alana Lazar, The University of Georgia
Robert H. Lyles, Emory University
Leslie M. (Lisa) Moore, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Edward J. Mulrow, NORC at the University of Chicago
Bin Nan, University of Michigan
Eva Petkova, New York University
Vasilis Bill Pikounis, Johnson & Johnson
Sophia Rabe-Hesketh, University of California at Berkeley
Shesh Nath Rai, University of Louisville
Timothy Jay Robinson, Wyoming WWAMI Medical Education Program
Philip Rocco Scinto, The Lubrizol Corporation
Larry Z. Shen, Pharmapace, Inc.
Pedro Luis do Nascimento Silva, IBGE – National School of Statistical Science
Philip B. Stark, University of California
Stefan Steiner, University of Waterloo
Elizabeth A. Stuart, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Joshua M. Tebbs, University of South Carolina
Naitee Ting, Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Tor Devin Tosteson, Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine
David Charles Trindade, Bloom Energy Corporation
Tyler J. VanderWeele, Harvard University
Melanie Wall, Columbia University
Hansheng Wang, Peking University
Changbao Wu, University of Waterloo
Lilly O. Yue, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Xiaohua Douglas Zhang, Merck Research Laboratories
Tian Zheng, Columbia University

Many more people were honored for their contributions to various causes that advance the field of statistics. Following is a list of awards and recipients:

Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award

The Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award was established in 1964 to honor the memory and distinguished career of Sam Wilks by recognizing outstanding contributions to statistics that carry on the spirit of his work. The 2014 Wilks award winner is Madan L. Puri of Indiana University for his pioneering and innovating research in multiple fields of mathematical statistics; for extraordinarily broad and deep contributions in initiating and developing rank-based methods in many areas of statistics; for his contributions to limit theory under dependence, extreme value theory, asymptotic expansions, large deviation theory, and fuzzy sets and measures; and for his tireless efforts to promote our discipline through his doctoral students and his many collaborations with colleagues around the world.

Gottfried E. Noether Awards

The Noether awards were established in 1999 by the wife and daughter of the late Gottfried Emanuel Noether of the University of Connecticut as a tribute to his memory. They recognize distinguished researchers and teachers and support research in nonparametric statistics. The Gottfried E. Noether Young Researcher Award winner for 2014 is Arnab Maity of North Carolina State University for outstanding early career contributions to nonparametric statistics. The Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award winner for 2014 is Raymond J. Carroll of Texas A&M University for outstanding contributions to the theory, applications, and teaching of nonparametric statistics.

Outstanding Statistical Application Award

Each year, the ASA recognizes a paper that is an outstanding application of statistics in the physical, biological, or medical sciences. This year’s winners are Joshua M. Tebbs, Christopher S. McMahan, and Christopher R. Bilder for their seminal work on classification and estimation for multiple infections in group testing procedures. Their paper, titled “Two-Stage Hierarchical Group Testing for Multiple Infections with Application to the Infertility Prevention Project,” was published in Biometrics in 2013.

W. J. Youden Award in Interlaboratory Testing

The W. J. Youden Award in Interlaboratory Testing was established in 1985 to recognize the authors of publications that make outstanding contributions to the design and/or analysis of interlaboratory tests or describe ingenious approaches to the planning and evaluation of data from such tests. The 2014 Youden Award went to Ying Huang, Yunda Huang, Shuying Su Li, Felicity Zoe Moodie, and Steven Self of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In their paper, “Comparing and Combining Data Across Multiple Sources via Integration of Paired-Sample Data to Correct for Measurement Error,” the authors present an original method for adjusting data obtained from different laboratories when true values of the test materials are not observed. The adjustment is based on materials that are split for assay by each laboratory. The authors describe the method, provide sample size calculations, and illustrate the two-laboratory case using simulated data and actual data from two HIV vaccine laboratories.

Waller Awards

Retired ASA Executive Director Ray Waller and his wife, Carolyn, established both the Waller Education Award and the Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award to recognize outstanding statistical educators. The 2014 Waller Award winner is Andrew Zieffler of the University of Minnesota in recognition of his outstanding contributions to and innovations in the teaching of elementary statistics. And the first winner of the 2014 Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award is Robin Lock of St. Lawrence University in recognition of his many years of outstanding teaching and contributions and creative efforts in statistical education.

Edward C. Bryant Scholarship Award

The Bryant scholarship trust is a permanent scholarship fund endowed by Westat to honor its cofounder and longtime leader, Edward C. Bryant. The award honors an outstanding graduate student who is studying survey statistics. The 2014 scholarship recipient is Shu Yang of Iowa State University for an excellent academic record and contribution to survey statistics.

W. J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting

Established through a gift from the family of Wilfrid Dixon, this award recognizes outstanding contributions to the practice of statistical consulting. The 2014 award was presented to Frank E. Harrell Jr. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine for exceptional contributions to advancing the science and art of statistical consulting and collaboration by developing innovative, widely used, statistical methodology and statistical software; for outstanding mentoring of faculty and students; and for superb leadership and teaching of the fundamental principles associated with these activities.

Gertrude M. Cox Scholarships

Samantha J. Taylor from the University of Pittsburgh and Laura B. Balzer from the University of California at Berkeley are the winners of the Gertrude M. Cox Scholarship in Statistics Award. Since 1989, the scholarship has been awarded by the ASA Committee on Women in Statistics and the Caucus for Women in Statistics to encourage women to enter statistically oriented professions. Amanda Mejia, Shannon Gallagher, and Vivian Meng-Wang were awarded honorable mentions.

Karl E. Peace Award

The Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society recognizes statisticians who have made substantial contributions to the statistical profession and society in general. The award—established by Christopher K. Peace, son of Karl Peace, on behalf of the Peace family to honor the life work of his father—was offered for the first time this year. The 2014 Peace award winner is Gary Grove Koch of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for exemplary scholarly research, teaching, and practice leading to improving public health, including a global impact on the design, analysis, and conduct of clinical trials in pharmaceutical regulation; for tireless efforts mentoring and leading students to fulfill their academic pursuits and promise; and for a philanthropic vision and commitment to his profession, universities, and students.