Donald Ray Akin

ASA member Donald Ray Akin, 68, of Raleigh, North Carolina, died July 31, 2015. He was a proud veteran, having served in the United States Marine Corps for four years with a portion during the Vietnam War.

Akin earned his bachelor’s degree in statistics from Colorado State University and his master’s degree in statistics from Iowa State University. He worked as a professional statistician since 1973 for many companies, including Research Triangle Institute and, most recently, for the State of North Carolina Department of Public Health.

Akin had a great love for his family and friends and took great joy in participating in the interests and pursuits of his children. He enjoyed being a volunteer and coach for Special Olympics and volunteering for the Special Theater Arts of Raleigh. He also thoroughly enjoyed sports and following the local sports teams.

View Akin’s obituary.

Norman E. Breslow

The statistics and public health communities worldwide were saddened at the loss of Norman E. Breslow on December 9, 2015. He died in Seattle after a long illness.

As a statistician, he was widely recognized for expanding the scope of biostatistics and making important contributions to epidemiology and oncology research. For many, his breadth and passion defined the ideal academic statistician: He lived a deep and simultaneous commitment to advancing statistical methodology, nurturing the careers of trainees and colleagues, and advancing biomedical science.

Early Life
Norman was born on February 21, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Lester and Alice Breslow. The eldest of three sons, he grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he attended Berkeley High School and enjoyed playing tennis and learning guitar. He developed an early love of hiking and skiing, climbing the Matterhorn at the age of 16, and he became a lifelong member of the Sierra Club. At Reed College in Portland, Norm switched his major from forestry to mathematics when he realized he could spend more time outdoors by studying math under a tree than by dissecting frogs in a lab.

Professional Life
Norm earned his PhD in statistics from Stanford University in 1967, the first PhD student advised by Bradley Efron. He spent his faculty career at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was a founding member of the department of biostatistics and the school of public health. As a biostatistics professor at UW, he developed a reputation for rigorous teaching and setting high standards for his students. An inveterate traveler, he enjoyed numerous scholarly exchanges abroad, including to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, the MRC Biostatistics unit in Cambridge, the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, and the University of Geneva.

Norm served as chair of the UW Department of Biostatistics from 1983–1993. As chair, he moved the department’s graduate degrees into the school of public health, mentored and supported young faculty, expanded the biostatistics course offerings for public health students, and championed strong methods development in support of public health and clinical research among his faculty.

His statistical research career, often conducted with one of his 14 PhD students, made fundamental contributions to several important areas including the analysis of censored survival data, data from matched and unmatched case-control studies, two-phase designs, case-cohort designs, and generalized linear mixed models. The two IARC monographs he co-authored with Nicholas Day on case-control and cohort studies are widely read classics.

In addition to research and teaching in biostatistics and epidemiology, Norm was devoted to clinical research on childhood cancers. Early in his career, he participated in the planning committee for the National Wilms Tumor Study, and his commitment to rigorous design and analysis in clinical trials and observational studies in Wilms Tumor research stretched for more than 40 years.

Academic Honors
Norm was awarded some of the highest honors available to statisticians and scientists, including ASA, Royal Statistical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science fellowships; the Speigelman Gold Medal Award from the American Public Health Association (1978); the Snedecor Award (1995) and R.A. Fisher Award (1995) from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies; the Nathan Mantel Award (2002) from the ASA Section on Statistics in Epidemiology; the Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science from Harvard University (2008); and the Medal of Honor, International Agency for Research on Cancer (2005). He also was elected to the International Statistical Institute (1982) and the Institute of Medicine (1986).

Legacy
Perhaps the best summary of Norm’s joint commitment to statistical rigor and scientific progress comes from his own words. As president of the International Biometric Society in 2002, he responded to concerns about the quality of medical research as follows: “To correct these unfortunate perceptions, we would do well to follow more closely our own teachings: conduct larger, fewer studies designed to test specific hypotheses; follow strict a priori protocols for study design and analysis; better integrate statistical findings with those from the laboratory; and exercise greater caution in promoting apparently positive results.”

Personal Life and Family
Norm adored being in the mountains and traveling the world, and he documented his life in stunning photographs. He loved listening to folk and classical music, and was proud of his fluency in French and Spanish. A dedicated Francophile, he spent several months each year at his second home in the village of Pierrevert, France, and watched the nightly French news while in Seattle. He is survived by his beloved wife Gayle, daughters Lauren Basson and Sara Jo Breslow, grandchildren Benjamin Basson and Ayelet Basson, brothers Jack Breslow and Stephen Breslow, nephew Paul Breslow, and stepmother Devra Breslow.

Subramanian Panchapakesan

Subramanian Panchapakesan (known as Kesan among friends and colleagues) passed away January 28, 2016, in Chennai (formerly Madras), where he was born on August 27, 1933.

Kesan graduated from Vivekananda College in Chennai with a BA (honors) degree in mathematics in 1954 and earned an M.Stat. from the Indian Statistical Institute in 1962. He moved to Purdue University in 1965 as a PhD student in mathematical statistics. Working under the guidance of professor Shanti S. Gupta, Kesan wrote his thesis, titled “Some Contributions to Multiple Decision (Selection and Ranking) Procedures,” and graduated in 1969. Beginning with this work, he had an illustrious career with pioneering contributions to the area of ranking and selection methodology and many other areas of mathematical statistics, including order statistics, reliability theory, and inference.

Throughout his long academic career, Kesan served in various capacities around the world. His first academic position was that of a lecturer in mathematics at Islamiah College, Vaniambadi, Tamilnadu, India (1955–1960). He retired from the department of mathematics at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, after 28 years of distinguished service and became a professor emeritus on June 1, 1998. In between, he worked for the Indian Statistical Institute in various capacities from 1962–1965 and held visiting faculty positions at Purdue University (1970, 1984, 1986) and the Institute of Mathematics at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan (1980). Even in retirement, he continued to be active in research, with publications and participation in many international conferences.

Kesan was best known in the research community for the Wiley research monograph “Multiple Decision Procedures: Methodology of Selecting and Ranking Populations,” co-authored with S. S. Gupta and published in 1979 (SIAM Reprint, 2002). In all, he had more than 80 research papers in journals and edited volumes and as technical reports. He also co-edited, with N. Balakrishnan, Advances in Statistical Decision Theory and Applications. Kesan’s collaborators and fellow researchers celebrated his work with an international conference held in his honor in December 2002 in Chennai, and later with a research volume titled Advances in Ranking and Selection, Multiple Comparisons, and Reliability.

Kesan was extremely generous with his time in the service of the statistical community and provided mentorship for many young researchers. He served several journals as a referee and associate editor for long periods, as well as writing many book reviews.

In addition to his devotion to statistics, Kesan had a passion for Indian music and celebrated it with an outstanding collection of reel-to-reel audiotapes, compact cassettes, and CDs, as well as periodic travel to Chennai to listen to maestros of Karnatic music. He also loved to travel and explore different cultures and societies. Kesan leaves behind numerous friends earned through his kindness and genuine interest in people around him.

Richard Schmidt

Richard Schmidt, professor emeritus in the department of biostatistics at the University at Buffalo (UB) and longtime ASA member, died peacefully January 30, 2016, at the age of 99.

Dick started teaching full time at UB in January of 1947. At the time, the department was called the department of statistics and insurance in the school of business administration. After earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration from UB, he immediately began working as a “teaching fellow” with a full 12-hour course load. He earned an MBA with minors in statistics, economics, and marketing from UB in 1950 and his doctorate in business economics from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1954. He taught and worked on his master’s degree at the same time and returned to UB in the summers to teach while he earned his doctorate.

Dick’s work ethic served him from the start. As a 1934 graduate of Amherst High School, he entered the workforce during the depths of the Depression. He had four brothers and sisters, and the family’s financial situation was not good. He took classes at the Buffalo Emergency Collegiate Center only because there were “zero jobs,” he said. He later took night classes at UB’s Millard Fillmore College and found work at Lackawanna Steel Construction from 1937–1940.

Dick married his high-school sweetheart, Mildred Kreger, on December 28, 1940, but was drafted three weeks later. He spent five years stationed on bases throughout the United States and was still in the military when his daughter, Carol Lee, was born on May 8, 1945. He noted the date: VE Day. Dick discovered statistics while taking a course taught by Robert Berner, now a professor emeritus in the school of management.

He finished his bachelor’s degree in one year and earned his advanced degrees. He was appointed chair of the UB statistics department from 1955–1959. In 1960, Dick spent a year overseas as an American guest professor at Strathclyde University, Glasgow, Scotland. But the trip that most influenced his career had come several years earlier, in 1956, when he traveled to New York City to take a six-week course on the UNIVAC I—the first mass-produced computer. Dick pointed out that, at the time, there was little interest in the vast machines whose computational power now makes modern statistics, as well as biostatistics, possible. He gave the first lecture at UB on computers on December 26, 1956, at a special faculty meeting.

Dick went on to teach a two-semester course on electronic business data processing. Since there were no computers on campus at the time, he took students to the Remington Rand Corporation on Washington Street in Buffalo to work on a UNIVAC I. In 1963, he co-authored a book titled Electronic Business Data Processing, which was widely used. His second book, Introduction to Computer Science and Data Processing, was written in 1965 and contained 10 examples of programs in different languages in the introduction alone. Dick learned about 50 computer languages in his career.

The Richard N. Schmidt Award is given annually to the top PhD students in biostatistics in recognition of academic excellence. The award was founded on two donations from Dick.