A special feature of the Joint Statistical Meetings is the ASA awards presentation. This year, the award winners sent in short videos sharing their accomplishments and gratitude. The videos were highlighted after the ASA President’s Address and can be viewed by those who registered for JSM.

Founders

Scott Evans
The George Washington University
For years of service to the ASA, including as president of the Boston Chapter; co-founder of the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports; chair of the Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences, Section on Medical Devices and Diagnostics, and Statistics in Sports Section; chair of the Young Investigator Award Committee and Distinguished Achievement Award Committee; member of the ASA Task Force on P-Values and Statistical Significance and the COVID-19 Task Force; advisory editor of Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research and executive editor of CHANCE; and member of the ASA Board of Directors.

Xuming He
University of Michigan
For leadership in statistics and service to statistical communities at the national and international levels; for service on the Noether Awards Committee, ASA Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights, ASA Committee on Federally Funded Research, and the Search Committee for the ASA Executive Director; for leadership as chair of the ASA Committee on Meetings for five years, program chair of the Joint Statistical Meetings, and chair of the Nonparametric Statistics Section; and for editorial leadership as co-editor of JASA Theory & Methods.

Kathy Monti
Rho, Inc. (retired)
For leadership, service, and dedication to the American Statistical Association over three decades; for guiding ASA chapters in the New England region, where she promoted the profession at all levels; for service and leadership of various committees, including the ASA Committee on Law and Justice, Advisory Committee on Continuing Education, and ASA Fellows Committee; for serving in several leadership roles in the Biopharmaceutical Section; for two terms of service on the ASA Board of Directors; and for tireless efforts on behalf of the association, which had a significant impact and will continue to resonate in the future.

Fellows

Walter T. Ambrosius, Wake Forest School of Medicine

Kellie J. Archer, The Ohio State University College of Public Health

Vipin Arora, Eli Lilly and Company

Amit Bhattacharyya, Alexion Pharmaceuticals

Julia L. Bienias, Nielsen

Jeffrey D. Blume, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Thomas M. Braun, University of Michigan School of Public Health

Jie Chen, Overland Pharma

Zhen Chen, National Institutes of Health

Jing Cheng, University of California, San Francisco

Victor De Oliveira, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Stephanie Eckman, RTI International

Elena A. Erosheva, University of Washington

Melody S. Goodman, New York University

Amelia M. Haviland, Carnegie Mellon University

Matthew J. Hayat, Georgia State University

Martin Ho, FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research

Li-Shan Huang, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

Kathryn Mary Irvine, US Geological Survey

Mikyoung Jun, University of Houston

Jian Kang, University of Michigan

Stanislav Kolenikov, Abt Associates

Earl C. Lawrence, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Yan Li, University of Maryland

Fang Liu, University of Notre Dame

Bo Lu, The Ohio State University

Pamela D. McGovern, USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service

Weiwen Miao, Haverford College

David Ian Ohlssen, Novartis Pharmaceuticals

Steve Pierson, American Statistical Association

Sowmya R. Rao, Boston University School of Public Health

Jasjeet S. Sekhon, Yale University

Kimberly F. Sellers, Georgetown University

Ramalingam Shanmugam, Texas State University

Russell Shinohara, University of Pennsylvania

Rui Song, North Carolina State University

Lisa M. Sullivan, Boston University School of Public Health

Eric Alan Vance, LISA, University of Colorado-Boulder

Olga Vitek, Northeastern University

Lily Wang, Iowa State University

Xiao Wang, Purdue University

Xiaofei Wang, Duke University Medical Center

Mark Daniel Ward, Purdue University

James G. Wendelberger, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Hongmei Zhang, University of Memphis

Yichuan Zhao, Georgia State University

Yingye Zheng, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Many more people were honored for their contributions to various causes that advance the field of statistics. Following are some of the awards and recipients:

Appreciation for Retiring Editors

• Heping Zhang, Yale University
  Editor, Applications and Case Studies and Coordinating
  Editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association
• Jianqing Fan, Princeton University
  Co-Editor, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics
• Christian Hansen, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
  Co-Editor, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics
• Tyler McCormick, University of Washington
  Editor, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics
• Jeffrey Witmer, Oberlin College and Conservatory
  Editor, Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education
• Ricardo Cao, Universidade da Coruña, Spain
  Editor, Journal of Nonparametric Statistics
• Jerome Reiter, Duke University
  Editor, Statistics and Public Policy
• Michael Elliott, University of Michigan
  Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology

Gertrude Cox Scholarship in Statistics

Born in 1900, Gertrude Cox is fondly known as the “First Lady of Statistics” for her pioneering roles in the predominantly male-dominated discipline of statistics. Among her many accolades and accomplishments, she became the first woman—and the first person—to earn a master’s degree in statistics from Iowa State University, where she was appointed assistant professor of statistics in 1939. Jointly sponsored by the ASA Committee on Women in Statistics and the Caucus for Women in Statistics, the Cox scholarship has been presented annually since 1989 to encourage women to enter statistically oriented professions. This year’s Gertrude Cox Scholarship went to Elizabeth Chase and Anni Hong.

To Elizabeth Chase, a biostatistics PhD student at the University of Michigan, for academic success and research in Bayesian shrinkage methods for semiparametric modeling, as evidenced by numerous publications and awards, and for an extraordinary commitment to community service and leadership in the biostatistics community.

To Anni Hong for her extraordinary leadership and volunteerism in using statistics to support underprivileged communities; for academic success in pursuit of a PhD in statistics and data science at Carnegie Mellon University; and for promising interdisciplinary research in statistics for social science.

Honorable mentions went to Elle Butler Basner of The Pennsylvania State University, Natalie Gasca of the University of Washington, and Taylor Mahoney of Boston University.

Mentoring Award

The ASA Mentoring Award honors those recognized by their colleagues for their sustained efforts to champion the work and develop the careers of statisticians.

The 2021 Mentoring Award honorees are Wayne Fuller from Iowa State University and Linda Young from USDA, NASS.

Fuller was nominated for his deep understanding of the relationship between technical work in statistics and the development of individual career paths; for providing an ideal model of mentorship for students and junior colleagues; and for his generosity of spirit and sustained dedication to his students and colleagues.

Young was nominated for her constant and continuing efforts mentoring both students and staff; for sharing her technical and leadership skills; and for encouraging her mentees to be tenacious and continue to improve as statisticians, researchers, and leaders in the field of statistics.

Monroe G. Sirken Award in Interdisciplinary Survey Methods Research (2020–2021, presented at AAPOR)

Monroe G. Sirken created an endowment to recognize a distinguished researcher for contributions to interdisciplinary survey research that improve the theory and methods of collecting, verifying, processing, presenting, or analyzing survey data.

Edith DeLeeuw of the University of California, Los Angeles is this year’s Sirken Award winner for exemplary interdisciplinary contributions to survey research that illuminate the relationship between data quality and data collection methods, enhance understanding of the causes and consequences of nonresponse, and advance cross-cultural and cross-national measurement.

Award of Outstanding Statistical Application

This award celebrates the authors of a paper that is an outstanding application of statistics in the physical, biological, or medical sciences. The honorees for the Outstanding Statistical Application Award are:

Qian Guan, Merck & Co., Inc.
Brian J. Reich, North Carolina State University
Eric B. Laber, North Carolina State University
Dipankar Bandyopadhyay, Virginia Commonwealth University

For their paper, “Bayesian Nonparametric Policy Search with Application to Periodontal Recall Intervals.”

Gottfried E. Noether Awards

The Noether awards were established to recognize distinguished researchers and teachers and to support the field of nonparametric statistics.

The 2021 Noether Senior Scholar Awardee is Regina Liu from Rutgers University. The 2021 Noether Young Scholar Award winner is Anru Zhang from Duke University.

Jackie Dietz Best Paper Award

Established in 2011, this award is given to the best paper published in the Journal of Statistics Education from the previous year.

The 2021 Jackie Dietz Best Journal of Statistics Education Paper Award honorees are Lynette M. Hudiburgh and Diana Garbinsky, both from Miami University, for their paper, “Data Visualization: Bring Data to Life in an Introductory Statistics Course.”

Waller Awards

These honors—the Waller Distinguished Teaching Career and Waller Education awards—were established with a contribution from retired ASA Executive Director Ray Waller and his wife, Carolyn. The former recognizes an individual for sustained excellence in teaching and statistics education, and the latter honors an individual for innovation in the instruction of elementary statistics.

Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award
Larry Lesser
University of Texas, El Paso
In recognition of his extensive and ingenious contributions to statistical education benefiting teachers, students, and the public, including pedagogical research, development of fun and engaging classroom activities designed to enhance student success, media outreach, and focus on social justice in mathematics education.

Waller Education Award
Amelia McNamara
University of St. Thomas
In recognition of her wide-ranging innovations in statistical education, including contributions to data journalism, integration of data science into the curriculum at many levels, outreach through social media, service to the statistics education community, and commitment to diversity in STEM.

W.J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting

Established through a gift from the family of Wilfrid J. Dixon, this award recognizes outstanding contributions to the practice of statistical consulting.

This year’s award winner is David DeMets, University of Wisconsin, for providing wise counsel to investigators making difficult decisions that straddle statistical, ethical, medical, and regulatory issues; for developing new statistical methods that significantly impact the practice of clinical trials; for excellence in teaching and dissemination of knowledge to clinical trialists that link the proper trial design with its conduct, data analysis, and interpretation; and for superb textbook writing.