Message from Outgoing Chair, Angela Dean

It has been an honor to serve as the 2012 chair for the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES). This has been a good year for our section; our membership has increased a little, and the section has co-sponsored a number of excellent conferences, courses, and talks. Thanks to the many years of creativity and hard work of Randy Tobias, our webmaster, the SPES website is an excellent source of information about future programs and items of interest. It also includes a record of past programs.

A new section feature that took effect in 2012 (under the guidance of Jo Martinez) was to partner with the Section on Quality and Productivity (Q&P) to offer webinars on a range of topics, including new methods in experimental design and Bayesian computation. Some of the webinars allow a reduced registration fee for SPES members. Watch for advertisements for the 2013 webinars!

Our section co-sponsors the annual Spring Research Conference, providing a number of student scholarships. New for this year, SPES also co-sponsored the Conference on Data Analysis, which addressed many of the challenges in climate, energy, and large-scale computation.

In addition, SPES co-sponsors the annual Fall Technical Conference, during which our FTC Steering Committee representative, Jeff Luner, expertly chaired the local organization committee. A SPES invited session provided excellent talks on model selection and variable selection, and a popular SPES-sponsored short course—Optimal Design of Experiments: A Case-Study Approach—was taught by Bradley Jones and Peter Goos. We are grateful to ASA President Bob Rodriguez for giving a thought-provoking Friday lunchtime talk, which encouraged us all to consider statistical leadership and ways to provide opportunities for younger future leaders.

A highlight of every year is JSM, and this year was no exception. Thanks to Paul Kvam, SPES program chair, the technical program featured three invited sessions, a topic-contributed session, and many excellent contributed papers and posters sponsored by SPES. There were four popular SPES roundtable sessions, organized by Stephanie DeHart, which sold out quickly. (Remember to book early for 2013!) SPES also sponsored a short course, “Generalized Additive Models and Their Extensions: The Penalized Regression Spline,” taught by Simon Wood of the University of Bath, UK.

For leisure, JSM’s location on the San Diego waterfront was superb. And, as always, we had a good time at the annual Q&P/SPES mixer. Many attended and found new and old friends. A huge thank you goes out to all who provided door prizes that helped with the fun of the evening. Also, we congratulate the winners and runners-up of the SPES 2011 best presentation awards, which were presented at the mixer. Jennifer Van Mullekom won the top 2011 award for a SPES talk, and Guillermo Frank won the award for outstanding 2011 SPES poster. In addition, the Technometrics editors presented the Eric Ziegel book award to Herb Weisberg.

SPES offers the Statistics in Chemistry Award annually to recognize outstanding collaborative endeavors between statisticians and chemists. It also was presented at JSM. Congratulations to this year’s winners, ASA member Bradley Jones and chemist Scott Allen.

We are seeking nominations for the 2013 award. If you know of an interesting collaboration between statisticians and chemists, please send a short nomination to Phil Ramsey at pjrstats@aol.com with a copy of the nominees’ paper.

The Marquardt Industrial Speakers Program continues to be popular, and visits by industrial statisticians to five academic institutions are planned for the near future. If you would like to become an industrial speaker or host a speaker, contact Van Mullekom at jennifer.h.van-mullekom@usa.dupont.com.

I would like to thank all the SPES for their creative ideas, advice, and hard work. The section is flourishing under their leadership. A number of officers are rotating off the SPES committee and allowing them a well-earned (and, for some, temporary) rest. We thank the following for their dedication to SPES:

• Phil Scinto (Past Chair)
• Paul Kvam (Program Chair)
• Greg Piepel (Council of Sections Representative)
• Randy Tobias (Webmaster)
• Jorge Romeu (Newsletter Associate Editor)
• Tena Katsaounis (Continuing Education Chair)
• Shane Reese (Spring Research Conference Management Committee)
• Peter Hovey (Spring Research Conference SPES Representative)

Call for Papers: 57th Annual Fall Technical Conference

We invite you to submit papers for presentation at the 57th Fall Technical Conference, to be held October 17–18, 2013, in San Antonio, Texas. The theme for 2013 is “Statistics and Quality: Spurring Innovation.”

FTC has long been a forum for both statistics and quality and is co-sponsored by the American Society for Quality (Chemical and Process Industries Division and Statistics Division) and the American Statistical Association (Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences and Section on Quality and Productivity). The goal of this conference is to engage researchers and practitioners in a dialog that leads to more effective use of statistics to improve quality.

If you are interested in presenting an applied or expository paper in any of three parallel sessions (i.e., statistics, quality control, or tutorial/case studies), contact Willis Jensen at wjensen@wlgore.com or Bob Wilkinson at Robert.Wilkinson@lubrizol.com.

Work should be strongly justified by application to a problem in engineering, manufacturing, process/chemical industry, the physical sciences, or a service industry. The mathematical level of the papers may range from introductory to that of the Journal of Quality Technology or Technometrics. Note which level of audience is targeted (i.e., introductory, intermediate, or advanced), so the committee can pair papers appropriately and plan a balanced program.

Members of the program committee welcome any suggestions for special session topics or speakers. The abstract submission deadline is February 28, 2013.

If you have ideas, please contact one of the program committee members.