The Gertrude M. Cox Award committee is accepting nominations for the award, established in 2003 through a joint agreement between the Washington Statistical Society (WSS) and RTI International. The award annually recognizes a statistician in their early to mid-career (fewer than 15 years after terminal degree) who has made significant contributions to one or more of the applied statistics areas in which Gertrude Cox (1900–1978) worked: survey methodology, experimental design, biostatistics, and statistical computing.

In 1945, Cox became director of the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina. In the 1950s, as head of the North Carolina State College Department of Experimental Statistics, 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 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 IBS (1968–1969). In 1975, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

The award is presented at the WSS Annual Dinner, usually held in June, with the recipient delivering a talk on a topic of general interest to the WSS membership before the dinner.

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, travel expenses to attend the WSS Annual Dinner, and a commemorative WSS plaque. Past recipients, in chronological order, 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, Jae Kwang Kim, Bhramar Mukherjee, and Elizabeth Stuart, and David Haziza.

Please email your nominations to Karol Krotki by February 23, 2019, with a supporting statement and CV (or a link to one).

If you have previously nominated a candidate and you wish that nomination to be reconsidered, please send an update of the supporting materials.