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1 February 2019 524 views No Comment

Emery N. Brown

Emery N. Brown

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) announced December 5 that Emery N. Brown—Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), associate director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), won the 2018 Dickson Prize in Science.

According to CMU’s website, “Dr. Brown’s outstanding achievements have earned him the distinction of being one of only 21 people elected to all three branches of the National Academies of Science. He is considered the ‘world’s expert on statistical analysis of neuronal data,’ according to CMU faculty member Robert E. Kass, and his research on anesthesia has been ‘truly transformative’ to that field.”

Brown directs an interdisciplinary team comprised of anesthesiologists, neuroscientists, bioengineers, mathematicians, neurologists, and a neurosurgeon from MGH, MIT, and Boston University (BU) that is deciphering the neuroscience of general anesthesia, CMU’s announcement noted. Brown also directs the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory at MGH and MIT, where the research develops statistical methods and signal processing algorithms to analyze data collected in neuroscience experiments.

Carnegie Mellon’s Dickson Prize in Science is awarded annually to the person who has been judged by the university to have made the most progress in the scientific field in the United States for the year in question. At CMU, the field of science is interpreted to include the natural sciences, engineering, computer science, or mathematics.

In accepting the award, Brown credited the many people he has worked with at MGH, MIT, BU, and Harvard. “I am extremely honored to receive the 2018 Dickson Prize in Science and to join the esteemed ranks of its past recipients,” he said. “I am especially grateful to all of the many students, post-docs, and colleagues whose successful collaborations have led to this recognition.”

Luke Tierney

Luke Tierney

The Statistical Computing and Graphics Award committee recently chose Luke Tierney of the University of Iowa as the recipient of the 2019 Statistical Computing and Graphics Award in recognition of his enormously influential creation of XLisp-Stat, substantial work on MCMC methods, and critical contributions to R. A special invited panel session will be held at JSM 2019 in Denver featuring panelists who are familiar with or have been influenced by his work.

Tierney, fellow of the ASA and Institute of Mathematical Statistics, is the Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences in the department of statistics and actuarial science at the University of Iowa.

He earned his PhD in operations research from Cornell in 1980.

After being on the statistics faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and then the University of Minnesota, he joined the University of Iowa in 2002, where he chaired the department from 2004–2014. He also served as editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics from 2004–2006.

Luke single-handedly built XLisp-Stat, an interactive statistical computing environment on top of the XLisp language, with many advanced features that influenced later statistical software. The newer generation of statisticians and data scientists has benefited from his fundamental contributions to R in areas such as memory management, namespacing, byte-code compiling, parallel computing, and, more recently, alternative representation for R objects.

Many of these contributions are critical yet the least known to general users.

His quiet contributions have enabled a generation of data analysts to do their work through the global open source data analysis system R, which bridges statistics and data science.

Alan Hutson

The Immuno-Oncology Translational Network (IOTN) Data Management and Resource-Sharing Center (DMRC) has been awarded to Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, which will serve as the overall coordination, administration, data sharing, data science, and state-of-the-art technology hub of the IOTN. Alan Hutson, chair of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and ASA Fellow, is the lead principal investigator for this project.

In addition, Hutson has been named chair of the IOTN Steering Committee.

The award of $6.28 million is in the form of a cooperative agreement between Roswell Park and the National Cancer Institute.

The DMRC will be a major national resource, providing a wealth of technical and logistical support and resources to 13 other high-profile Cancer Moonshot sites within the IOTN network. Moreover, it is anticipated that the IOTN will be expanded during the next fiscal year.

The Roswell Park investigators were selected because of their unique and wide-ranging complementary sets of expertise and technological prowess, from biostatistics, bioinformatics, immunotherapy, and immuno-oncology to Bioconductor, ontology, data science, and systems architecture.

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