COPSS Honors Four with Awards

The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) presents awards annually to honor statisticians who have made outstanding contributions to the profession. For 2019, four awards were presented at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver on July 31 by COPSS Chair Bhramar Mukherjee and the award committee members.

Hadley Wickham of RStudio is the winner of the 2019 Presidents’ Award. (See the interview with Wickham.)

Susan Ellenberg of the University of Pennsylvania is the 2019 F.N. David Award winner and first F.N. David Lecturer. This award, sponsored jointly by COPSS and the Caucus for Women in Statistics, is granted biennially to a female statistician who serves as a role model to other women by her contributions to the profession through excellence in research, leadership of multidisciplinary collaborative groups, statistics education, or service to the professional societies.

Ellenberg’s award citation reads “for impactful leadership roles at the NIH, FDA, and the University of Pennsylvania developing and evaluating new methodologies and specialized approaches to improve the conduct of clinical trials; for influencing ethical practice and leading development of important regulatory policies; for leadership in setting standards for clinical trial data-monitoring committees; for senior statistical leadership for many multicenter clinical research network clinical trials; for distinguished leadership in numerous professional societies and national and international committees addressing major public health challenges; and for serving as an exceptional academic role model for faculty and students.”

Ellenberg’s lecture was titled “Statisticians and the Evolution of the Randomized Clinical Trial.”

Paul R. Rosenbaum of the University of Pennsylvania is the recipient of the 2019 R.A. Fisher Award and Lectureship, which honors both the contributions of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher and the work of a present-day statistician for advancement of statistical theory and applications. This annual award recognizes outstanding scholarship in statistical sciences that has had a highly significant impact on scientific investigations.

Rosenbaum’s award citation reads “for pioneering contributions to statistical methodology for observational studies, important applications of such methodology to health outcomes studies, lucid books on statistical principles and methodology for observational studies, and excellent mentoring.”

Rosenbaum’s lecture was titled “An Observational Study Used to Illustrate Methodology for Such Studies.”

Sudipto Banerjee of the University of California, Los Angeles is the recipient of the 2019 George W. Snedecor Award. Granted biennially, the award honors an individual who was instrumental in the development of statistical theory in biometry with a noteworthy publication in biometry within three years of the award date.

Banerjee’s award citation reads” for foundational contribution to the field of biometrics, especially for groundbreaking and fundamental work on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and the analysis of large spatial data sets; for significant contributions to the mapping of disease incidence in space and time and the analysis of environmental exposures.”

Banerjee won the award for her publication, jointly written with A. Datta, A.O. Finley, and A.E. Gelfand, titled, “Hierarchical nearest-neighbor Gaussian process models for large geostatistical datasets,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.