Xiao-Li Meng, Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics and Department Chair, Harvard University
Twenty-five years ago, my PhD cohort at Harvard Statistics consisted of four students, taught by five ladder faculty. The overall course enrollment was about 300, and the combined number of concentrators (majors) and master’s students was a single digit. Today, both the faculty and PhD cohort sizes have doubled, the numbers of concentrators and master’s exceed 50 and 20, respectively, and the total enrollment reached almost 2,000.
“So, what’s the big deal?” you may wonder, “the growth in my department is even faster than yours!” Exactly—that’s the big deal. The statistics discipline is no longer perceived as “mathematics lite” or “accounting poor,” but as a field that generates headlines such as “For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics” (New York Times, August 5, 2009). As a profession, our team dream to establish statistics as a visible, viable, and vital scientific discipline is largely realized. Our next team dream—that principled statistical thinking and reasoning becoming part of the routine vocabulary of a civilized society—will require substantially more dream teams. Heroic individual effort is always great inspiration, but teamwork is essential to achieving and sustaining societal accomplishments.
David Pickard was such a heroic individual, particularly with regard to undergraduate education. To honor him, a memorial fund was established in 2010 by a group of alumni under the leadership of Victor Solo, a Harvard colleague of Pickard’s. The fund document summarizes well its purposes:
Happily, we now have a dream team to enhance Pickard’s mission. David Harrington, our codirector of undergraduate studies (DUS) and recipient of the Roger Nichols teaching award at Harvard Public School of Health, has played a critical role in revamping our undergraduate program. So has Joseph Blitzstein, the other DUS. Like Pickard, Blitzstein won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize (2009) and Levenson Prize (2011) and is a household name among Harvard students (Google “Stat 110 at Harvard” on YouTube). It is therefore extremely fitting that Blitzstein received the inaugural David Pickard Memorial Award and was appointed Harvard Statistics’ first full professor of practice on July 1.
Michael Parzen, Harvard Statistics’ first senior lecturer, and Kevin Rader, its first preceptor, brought the necessary critical mass for a dream team. Parzen joined in 2010 with a stellar 17-year record of teaching MBAs, a challenging group of students to teach. Rader, a winner of the Pickard Teaching Fellow Award, has been instrumental in carrying out much of the behind-the-scenes work, from training teaching fellows to assisting in course administration.
The dream team will expand via an open-field and open-rank cluster hiring. The inaugural Pickard award citation summarizes what we are looking for: a clearly wonderful scholar and mentor and a wonderfully clear teacher and communicator.
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