People News for March 2012

Sallie Keller

Sallie Keller, 2006 ASA president, was recently appointed as provost of The University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, effective this summer.

Keller is currently the director of the Institute for Defense Analyses Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington, DC. She leads more than 40 researchers who gather and analyze information about international and national science and technology issues for the White House, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and federal commerce and energy departments. Her five-year term at Waterloo begins July 1, when she will also become a tenured professor in the department of statistics and actuarial science.

“Waterloo is an institution known for being focused on how to bridge the boundaries of the disciplines,” said Keller. “I have had success in building these kinds of connections, and so I believe in institutions like Waterloo that promote entrepreneurial activity and faculties working together.”

Keller earned a PhD in statistics from Iowa State University of Science and Technology. She holds BS and MS degrees in mathematics from the University of South Florida.

Judea Pearl

ASA member Judea Pearl and Sir Richard Friend of the University of Cambridge were recently named winners of Technion’s 2011 Harvey Prize in Science and Technology. The prize ceremony will take place at Technion on March 29.

Pearl, professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles, through his wide-ranging and keen research, laid the theoretical foundations for knowledge representation and reasoning in computer science. His theories for inference under uncertainty, and most notably the Bayesian network approach, have profoundly influenced diverse fields such as artificial intelligence, statistics, philosophy, health, economics, social sciences, and cognitive sciences. The Harvey Prize is awarded to Pearl in recognition of his foundational work that has touched a multitude of spheres of modern life.

Pearl completed his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Technion in 1960.