Jeff Wu Receives 2017 Box Medal from ENBIS

Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) announces that Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor Jeff Wu has received the 2017 Box Medal Award from ENBIS, the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics.

The Box Medal is named after George Box, the late British-American statistician who is considered one of the greatest statistical minds of our time. Box was extremely influential on Wu’s work during his formative years as a young academic at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Box was also a professor.

In a 2015 interview with professor Hugh Chapman of Acadia University and professor Roshan Joseph of ISyE, Wu affirmed that Box was a tremendous influence: “[Box] was a great scholar and a great lecturer. His opinions and passion for work were contagious. … I respected him a lot.”

According to the ENBIS website, the Box Medal honors the legacy of George Box and is awarded each year to “an extraordinary statistician who has remarkably contributed with his work to the development and the application of statistical methods in European business and industry.”

The ENBIS press release announcing Wu as this year’s Box Medal recipient stated that “with the medal, the link between two great statisticians is strengthened even further.”

The press release also specified that Wu was chosen for his many contributions to the study of statistics, as well as “his ability to clearly explain complex concepts … and for systematically passing on his knowledge.” Wu has supervised 45 PhD students in the course of his career, many of whom are active researchers in the statistical sciences.

Wu will accept the Box Medal at the ENBIS conference, held from September 9–14, in Naples, Italy. While there, he will also deliver a keynote speech on September 12.

Wu earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1971 and a PhD in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. He has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of Waterloo; and the University of Michigan.

He is known for his work on the convergence of the EM algorithm; resampling methods; nonlinear least squares; and sensitivity testing and industrial statistics, including design of experiments, robust parameter design, and computer experiments. He also has been credited for coining the term “data science” as early as 1997.

Wu has received several awards, including the COPSS Presidents’ Award (1987), the Shewhart Medal (2008), the R. A. Fisher Lectureship (2011), and the Deming Lecturer Award (2012). He is an elected member of Academia Sinica (2000) and the National Academy of Engineering (2004) and has received many other awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo.

He has published more than 170 peer-reviewed articles and two books. He was the second editor of Statistica Sinica.