The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) presents awards annually to honor statisticians who have made outstanding contributions to the profession. For 2020, three awards were presented at the Joint Statistical Meetings on August 5 by COPSS Chair Bhramar Mukherjee and the award committee members.
Rina Foygel Barber of The University of Chicago is the winner of the 2020 Presidents’ Award. This award is presented annually to a young member of one of the COPSS participating societies in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession. The award citation recognized Barber “for fundamental contributions to statistical sparsity and selective inference in high-dimensional problems; for the creative and novel knockoff filter to cope with correlated coefficients; for contributions to compressed sensing, the jackknife, and conformal predictive inference; and for the encouragement and training of graduate and undergraduate students.” See the interview with Barber.
Amita Manatunga of Emory University is the 2020 Elizabeth L. Scott Award and the first E. L. Scott Lecturer. This award is granted biennially to an individual who has helped foster opportunities in statistics for women. The award citation recognized Manatunga “for dedicated mentoring of the next generation of statisticians; committed leadership in expanding statistical opportunities for women and minorities at the individual, institutional, and professional society levels; and excellence in biostatistical research.” Manatunga’s lecture was titled “Statistical Methods for Diagnosis of Complex Diseases with Complex Data.”
Kathryn Roeder of Carnegie Mellon University is the recipient of the 2020 COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship. This award recognizes outstanding scholarship in statistical sciences that has had a highly significant impact of statistical methods on scientific investigations. The award citation recognized Roeder “for outstanding contributions to statistical science in the areas of mixture models, semiparametric inference, and multiple testing and to the development of statistical methods aimed at finding the genetic basis of human disease, including the development of powerful methods for discovering genes underlying psychiatric disorders such as autism.” Roeder’s lecture was titled “Statistics and Genetics Offer a Window into Autism.”
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