Pete Hovey, 2018 SPES Chair

I know it is a little late, but Happy New Year!

I’ve been a SPES member for at least 20 years, and I still didn’t realize how active SPES is until I took on the role of chair this year. I am taking this opportunity to remind you of the many activities SPES sponsors and invite you to participate in at least one this year.

Networking is vitally important in any career, and you can meet your colleagues in SPES at three conferences. First up is the 2018 Joint Research Conference on Statistics in Quality, Industry, and Technology. This is a joint meeting of the 25th Spring Research Conference on Statistics in Industry, which SPES jointly sponsors with the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the 35th Quality and Productivity Conference, which is sponsored by the ASA’s Section on Quality and Productivity (Q&P). The joint conference is being held June 11–14 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is a small regional conference that provides a great opportunity for new researches to get to know the SPES and Q&P communities. Send questions by email.

The annual Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) will be held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, this year from July 28 to August 2. SPES will host a variety of invited and contributed sessions during which you can learn about new statistical methods and applications to a variety of physical and engineering sciences. And don’t forget to attend the business meeting/mixer, which SPES usually cosponsors with other sections.

The last SPES-sponsored conference of the year is the 2018 Fall Technical Conference being held October 3–5 in West Palm Beach, Florida. This conference is cosponsored by the ASQ Statistics Division and the ASA’s SPES and Q&P sections. The theme is “Statistics and Quality: Riding the Big Data Wave.”

A continuing SPES program is the Marquardt Memorial Industrial Speakers Program, which is funded by a generous endowment made by Margaret Marquardt in memory of her late husband, Donald Marquardt, who was an ASA Fellow and former ASA president. The program’s objective is to familiarize students with the role of statisticians in industry, an application area to which students often are not exposed. The program seeks to fill this gap by bringing experienced industrial statisticians to campus to talk directly with students about their work and industrial experiences. If you would like to have a speaker visit your campus or if you would like to tell the world about life as an industrial statistician, contact the program’s chair, Vaneeta Grover.

We are also interested in new initiatives to provide services to our members. Currently, the ASA is promoting an initiative to improve mentoring in the statistical profession. If you have an interest in mentoring and would be willing to help SPES develop a mentoring program, send me a note.

SPES is open to any type of career development programs you think would be useful. If you have an idea, please contact me or any of the officers to see what we can do to help implement it. Also, if you want to add a leadership role to your résumé, please consider running for a SPES office. The jobs don’t require an excessive amount of time and you get the chance to meet some interesting and enthusiastic colleagues.