Peihua Qiu
The University of Florida (UF) has named leading statistics researcher, Peihua Qiu, the founding chair of its department of biostatistics.
Qiu is currently a professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Statistics. He will begin heading the new department, which is administered jointly by the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions and the College of Medicine, on July 1.
“The position was attractive to me for several reasons,” Qiu said. “I feel the environment at the UF Health Science Center is very supportive of the biostatistics department, especially the top administrators, who recognize the importance of biostatistics. With six health colleges and several institutes at UF, there are enormous resources and collaboration opportunities for the department. There is great potential for the biostatistics department to grow.”
Qiu is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He also was named editor of Technometrics for a three-year term beginning this year.
UF’s department of biostatistics was created in 2010 and brings together biostatistics faculty from the colleges of public health and health professions and medicine.
Visit the UF Department of Biostatistics for more information.
C. F. Jeff Wu
C. F. Jeff Wu is the 2012 recipient of the U.S. Army Wilks Award, presented during the Army Conference on Applied Statistics held last October in Monterey, California.
This award was established in 1981 to commemorate the career of Samuel S. Wilks and his service to the Army. It is given periodically to a “deserving individual who has made a substantial contribution to statistical methodology and application, impacting the practice of statistics in the Army through personal research in statistics or application of statistics in the solution of Army problems.”
Wu was honored for his many pioneering and landmark contributions to the advancement of statistical theory and practice spanning the fields of survey sampling, EM algorithm, asymptotics, resampling methods, experimental design, computer experimentation and data synthesis, robust parameter design, and industrial statistics. Specific to Army problems, his early research on sequential designs for quantal response models addressed critical issues of how to conduct sensitivity experiments efficiently when testing is destructive and expensive.
Related contemporary research results, exploiting recent developments in representing intricate physical processes, have promoted fast surrogate model techniques for accurately approximating sophisticated simulations and have spawned a number of innovative design and analysis methodologies with broad applicability.
After earning his PhD in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976, Wu began his academic career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1977–1988, including Army Mathematics Research Center affiliation). Subsequently, he moved to the University of Waterloo (1988–1993), University of Michigan (1993–2003), and Georgia Institute of Technology (2003–present).
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, American Statistical Association, American Society for Quality, and Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences. His publications include 150 refereed papers, one research monograph, and two widely acclaimed textbooks on modern experimental design.
Wu is only the fourth person to have received both the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies’ awards—the Presidents’ Award, presented to the best statistician under the age of 40, and the Fisher Lecture Award, venerating accomplishments in the advancement of statistical theory and applications. Other notable honors include the Frank Wilcoxon Prize, Brumbaugh Award, Jack Youden Prize (twice), John Wiley Award in Probability and Statistics, Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research, Pan Wen-Yuan Distinguished Research Award, Shewhart Medal, and Einstein Chair Professorship.
Leave a Reply