Bhramar Mukherjee

The Washington Statistical Society (WSS) and RTI International chose Bhramar Mukherjee, John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, as this year’s recipient of the Gertrude M. Cox Award.

Since earning her PhD from Purdue University in 2001, Mukherjee has collaborated on more than 100 refereed publications in areas such as Bayesian analysis of data generated under case‐control and outcome dependent sampling mechanisms gene‐environment interaction. She is an ASA fellow and served as the 2013 Joint Statistical Meetings Program Committee chair.

Mukherjee will give the Cox Award presentation at RTI International on June 28, prior to the WSS Annual Dinner.

The award was established in 2003 through a joint agreement between the Washington Statistical Society and RTI International to recognize statisticians in early to mid-career (roughly no more than 15 years after terminal degree) who have already made significant contributions to statistical practice.

The award is in memory of Gertrude M. Cox (1900–1978). In 1945, Cox became director of the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina. In the 1950s, as head of the department of experimental statistics at North Carolina State College, she played a key role in establishing mathematical statistics and biostatistics departments at the University of North Carolina. Upon her retirement from North Carolina State University in 1960, Cox became the first head of the statistical research division at the newly founded RTI. She was a founding member of the International Biometric Society (IBS) and, in 1949, became the first woman elected into the International Statistical Institute. She served as president of both the American Statistical Association (1956) and the IBS (1968–1969). In 1975, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

This award is made possible by funding from RTI International, and the recipient is chosen by a six-person committee—three each from WSS and RTI. The award includes a $1,000 honorarium, paid travel to attend the Cox Award presentation/WSS Annual Dinner, and a commemorative plaque containing the WSS logo. Past recipients include Sharon Lohr, Alan Zaslavsky, Tom Belin, Vance Berger, Francesca Domenici, Thomas Lumley, Jean Opsomer, Michael Elliott, Nilanjan Chatterjee, Amy Herring, Frauke Kreuter, Jerome Reiter, and Jae Kwang Kim.

Alyson Wilson

This year’s Army Wilks Award winner is Alyson Wilson, professor of statistics at North Carolina State University.

The award—established to commemorate the career of Samuel S. Wilks and his service to the Army—is given to a deserving individual who has made a substantial contribution to statistical methodology and application affecting the practice or application of statistics to problems in defense and security.

The Army Wilks Award is given periodically at the Conference on Applied Statistics in Defense (CASD), which was held October 19–22, 2015, at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.