People News for December

Bani K. Mallick

Bani K. Mallick, distinguished professor and Susan M. Arseven Chair of Statistics at Texas A&M, has been selected to receive a Fulbright Distinguished Chair for the 2017–2018 year.

Fulbright Distinguished Chair Awards are viewed as among the most prestigious appointments in the Fulbright Scholar Program. Only about 40 awards are given globally each year to eminent scholars who have a significant publication and teaching record.

Mallick has been recognized with the Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair, named to honor his host country India and its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. As part of the chair, he will spend four months later this year conducting research and lecturing at institutes across India on big data cancer research, which he specifically selected.

Emmanuel Candès

Stanford University’s Emmanuel Candès, the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics, has been named a MacArthur Fellow. The prestigious recognition is a five-year grant to individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future. It is designed to provide recipients with flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional activities without specific obligations or reporting requirements.

One of 24 recipients in the class of 2017, Candès is recognized for exploring the limits of signal recovery and matrix completion from incomplete data sets with implications for high-impact applications in multiple fields. His research focuses on reconstructing high-resolution images from small numbers of random measurements, as well as recovering the missing entries in massive data tables. At the interface of applied and theoretical mathematics, his work is generating new lines of research in information theory, as well as laying the groundwork for improvements in many devices that make use of signal and image processing methods.

Read more about Candès and the MacArthur award winners on the Fellow website.

2016 and 2017 Kutner Distinguished Alumni Award Winners

On October 23, the department of biostatistics and bioinformatics in the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health presented the 2016 Kutner Distinguished Alumni Award to Scott Clark, senior director of statistics at Eli Lilly & Company, and the 2017 Kutner Distinguished Alumni Award to Brent Blumenstein, founder and president of TriARC Consulting. The award, given annually to a former graduate of the department, is for distinguished service to the discipline.

The event also honored the 40+-year exemplary Emory career of Kutner, Rollins professor of biostatistics. Lance Waller, Rollins professor and chair of the Emory Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, served as the master of ceremonies. Invited speakers in addition to Waller included Rollins School of Public Health dean, James Curran; former department chair E.C. Hall; and senior executive associate dean for academic affairs Richard Levinson. John Neter, professor emeritus of the University of Georgia, and Fadlo Khuri, president of American University, Beirut, Lebanon, sent congratulatory letters.

Kutner, in his closing remarks, thanked all the speakers and attendees for their participation. He then gave a brief account of his most important and influential research projects while at Emory University and when he chaired the department of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (1994–1999).

Sastry Pantula

Oregon State University (OSU) was chosen by the ASA as one of three REU sites this past summer and hosted students from across the country from June 19 until August 25. The four REU participants were selected from more than 100 applicants in a highly competitive process. To read more about the OSU REU program, visit OSU’s website.