Martha S. Hearron

Martha S. Hearron of Kalamazoo, Michigan, passed away November 29, 2014, at age 71. She was born April 4, 1943, in Highland Park, Illinois.

Martha earned her bachelor’s of science degree and her master’s degree in public health from the University of Michigan. Following graduation, she spent 32 years working as a biostatistician for The Upjohn Company. While there, she established several precedents, including being the first female hired to a professional position, the first female hired into management, and the first female to serve as president of the National Association of Biostatisticians.

During her retirement, Martha remained active, devoting her time to several causes, including the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance; the Western Michigan University Theater Department; and Planned Parenthood of Kalamazoo.

Martha was united in marriage to Arthur Hearron, who preceded her in death in April of 2005.

For more information, visit Martha’s personalized web page.

Jack Moshman

Jack Moshman of Bethesda, Maryland, passed away August 24, 2014, at Sibley Memorial Hospital. Jack was born in Queens, New York City, in 1924 and served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a cryptographer during WWII from 1942–1946, stationed in Belgium, Scotland, and France.

Jack earned his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Tennessee and worked at Oak Ridge National Labs before moving to New Jersey, where he became an adjunct professor at Rutgers University and worked at Bell Labs in Morristown.

He moved with his family to the Bethesda area in 1956 to become a vice president at the Corporation for Economic and Industrial Research, an early Beltway think tank. Jack began his own consultancy company, Moshman Associates, in 1970 and continued at the helm of his company until he retired in 2011 at the age of 86.

Jack developed the first election projection statistical model in which computers were used by a major network to predict congressional, gubernatorial, and presidential political winners with often only a small number of key precincts and total vote recorded. This model was used starting in 1960 for NBC, and Jack moved to ABC for the elections from 1964 onward. All rights to his model were later sold to ABC, but he continued to be retained as a consultant. During this time, he assisted the network on the calling of all races, along with the input from the network’s political consultants. He was a founder of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, later serving as their president. He also was elected a Fellow of the ASA in 1969.

Jack was called as a statistics expert witness to various major law firms and was involved in several prominent court cases, including one involving Ford Motor Company and the determination of damage awards for faulty ignition switches.

See Jack’s full obituary for more information.

Dorian Feldman

Dorian Feldman passed away January 12, 2015. He was born in Liege, Belgium, on March 22, 1931.

In June of 1939, Dorian came to the United States, growing up in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1953, he graduated from Yale University and earned his doctorate in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. Dorian retired as professor of statistics at Michigan State University in 2001.

To read more about Dorian, see his full obituary.