A Statistical Star from the East Shines in the West

Barry D. Nussbaum

In the summer of 2020, the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) won a $900,000 Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative Fund grant, which will match $900,000 privately raised to establish an endowed chair of statistics that honors Bimal Sinha at UMBC. The privately donated funds are the first endowed chair gift at UMBC. The new chair will be called the “Sinha Ennovation Chair.”

Sinha won the UMBC Presidential Research Professor Award in 2008 and the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award in 2012. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

His research activities span topics in theoretical and applied statistics, including multivariate analysis, linear models, ranked set sampling, environmental statistics, statistical meta-analysis, and data analysis under confidentiality protection. Sinha has served on the editorial board of a number of national and international statistics journals. He has coedited several volumes and coauthored four books. In addition to research, he has proven to be a skilled analyst for practical problems, having consulted with the US Environmental Protection Agency and US Census Bureau. He is also a dedicated professor, having guided more than 30 students through PhD degrees.

The statistics program at UMBC has seen rapid growth. This is proven by the number of undergraduate majors in statistics nearly doubling in the last five years, from 34 in fall 2014 to 62 in fall 2019. It has also grown immensely in international stature with the creation of the Annual International Conference on Statistics in Africa. The program has teamed up with a half dozen African universities to produce a top-quality conference in several African nations and led to African students being able to study in the US.

The true measure of Sinha’s accomplishments, however, is the way he grew the UMBC statistics group from three faculty members in 1985 into a statistics powerhouse both domestically and internationally. The program now has 10 faculty members, four of whom are fellows of the ASA.

With these funds, the Sinha Ennovative Chair will be established to help UMBC meet the growing demand of educating, training, and mentoring statistics undergraduate and graduate students. In particular, this professorship will increase the depth and variety of the UMBC statistics graduate program.