Heleno Bolfarine

Submitted by Dipak K. Dey and Victor Hugo Lachos Dávila of the University of Connecticut and Jorge Luis Bazán of the University of Sao Paulo

Heleno Bolfarine, an influential statistician from Latin America died June 26, 2021. He was a professor at the University of São Paulo-Brazil Institute of Mathematics and Statistics.

Under the supervision of Richard Barlow, Bolfarine earned his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982. He became a faculty member at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics in 1977 and a full professor in 1992.

Bolfarine was the editor of the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics and associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference and Communication in Statistics: Theory and Methods. He was also co-author with Shelemyahu Zacks of Prediction Theory for Finite Populations, published by Springer in 1992.

Bolfarine was awarded the Brazilian Statistics Association Award in 2012 for his lifetime contribution to the development of statistics in Brazil and the JABUTI Award for his book Elementos de Amostragem (in Portuguese). He was also a full member of the São Paulo State Academy of Science. An outstanding statistician, Bolfarine made significant novel contributions in Latin America and abroad.

Just a few days before his death, Bolfarine received the prestigious Mahalanobis International Award, which is sponsored by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation of the Government of India. It recognizes an individual for lifetime achievements in statistics in a developing country or region and is usually given at the International Statistical Institute’s biennial meeting.

Bolfarine was awarded for his outstanding research contributions and academic leadership, his lifelong and outstanding performance in capacity-building through teaching and mentoring several generations of statisticians in Latin America, and his leadership and promotion of statistics and the statistics profession at national and international levels, with special emphasis on Latin America.

Bolfarine was an outstanding and renowned researcher in statistical inference, errors-in-variables models, calibration, reliability, distributions and sampling, prediction theory for finite populations, and mixed models and regression analysis. He published five books and more than 230 research papers in respected journals, in addition to a large number of reports and book chapters. He has about 5,000 Google Scholar citations, showing that his work was widely recognized and seminal in his fields of research.

Bolfarine also made outstanding contributions to the teaching of statistics and the education of researchers in statistics in Brazil and Latin America in general. He was an adviser to 44 PhD students at the University of São Paulo, forming PhDs from Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia, who are now part of at least 26 statistics departments in Latin American universities. This makes Bolfarine a capacity-builder and source of inspiration for thousands of new statistics students in Latin American. He also authored or co-authored three statistics text books in Portuguese (in addition to those in English). Moreover, his extensive traveling to universities all over Latin America to present more than 100 colloquia or invited talks has been of great importance to the development and dissemination of statistics in the region.

Bolfarine contributed to the statistical profession internationally by being active in the Brazilian Statistical Association, Argentinian Statistical Society, Chilean Statistical Society, and Colombian Statistical Society, as well as the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, International Statistical Institute, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and International Chinese Statistical Association. He was president of the Brazilian Statistical Association and editor in chief of the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, which is the most prestigious statistics journal in Latin America. He also was associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference and co-editor of Sankhya. In addition, he led the organization of several scientific events in Latin America as the Latin American Congress of Probability and Mathematical Statistics and Latin-American Congress of Statistical Societies.

Lai Kow Chan

Submitted by Christian Genest, McGill University, and John F. Brewster, University of Manitoba

Lai Kow Chan, a longtime member and fellow of the ASA who was praised for his work in quality assurance and his academic leadership, passed away at home on December 23, 2020. He was 80.

Home for Lai was Hong Kong, where he was born on November 5, 1940. After graduating from Hong Kong Baptist College in 1962, he completed his education at the University of Western Ontario with an MA in 1964 and a PhD in 1966. He then taught at the University of Toronto for one year before returning to London, Ontario, where he was offered a tenure-track position. Over the next 15 years, he progressed through the ranks and published regularly in statistics and actuarial journals on popular topics such as distribution theory, estimation, and asymptotics.

The first major climacteric in Lai’s career occurred in 1980, when he was recruited as head of the department of statistics at the University of Manitoba. To give a new impetus to the group, he proposed statistical quality control as a common research topic and walked the talk by reorienting his own work in this direction. His success is epitomized by a 1988 paper by Lai, Smiley Cheng, and Fred Spiring (who was then a PhD student) on the Cpm (also called Taguchi) capability index. This paper became a classic.

During Lai’s 14-year headship, the department’s reputation in quality management rose steadily and awareness of the use of statistical methods for quality improvement was raised within the Winnipeg business community by the dozens of workshops on statistical process control, total quality, and industrial experimental design given by department members. The group also hosted the 1985 Annual Meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC), and Lai served on both the SSC board of directors (1985–1987) and as editor-in-chief of The Canadian Journal of Statistics (1992–1994). The International Statistical Institute also benefited from his membership on council.

A second decisive moment in Lai’s career occurred in 1994, when he chose to go home only a few years before the handover of Hong Kong to China. He accepted a position as professor and chair of applied statistics and operational research at City University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and served as both the head of the department of management sciences (1994–1997, 2000–2001) and dean of the faculty of business (2001–2006). Under his leadership, the CUHK College of Business reached unprecedented heights in business education and research. Various new programs were launched, and he spearheaded the college’s effort in achieving AACSB accreditation in 2005.

Eager to support the development of statistics in China, Lai supervised several PhD students during this period. He also coauthored influential work, notably with Ming-Lu Wu, on quality function deployment. Among many other commitments, he acted as an adviser on statistics teaching material for China’s State Statistical Bureau and served on the Statistics Advisory Board for the Commissioner for Census and Statistics of the Hong Kong SAR.

A third critical turn in Lai’s career occurred in 2006 when, at the age of 66, he took up the challenge of helping build the Macao University of Science and Technology in its formative years. Besides serving as director of the Institute for Sustainable Development (2006–2017), he was vice president (2007–2011) and dean of the school of business (2009–2014). He was also adviser for the sustainable economic development strategy and Pearl River Delta Region development plan for several departments in the Macao SAR government. Moreover, drawing on experience acquired in Hong Kong with the design of economic indexes such as the Centa-City Property Index (1999), Lai was involved in setting up Macao’s consumer confidence and satisfaction indexes (2007–2008).

Needless to say, Lai’s outstanding record of research and service earned him much acclaim. He was an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (1979) and became a fellow of the American Statistical Association (1981), Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1985), American Society for Quality (1990), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (1991). He was also a fellow of the UK Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications.

Lai was not only an esteemed scholar and a visionary leader but also a meticulous, good-natured person who inspired confidence and genuinely cared for his fellow human beings. He was energetic, passionate, and persuasive. He drew inspiration from quality guru W. Edwards Deming and Hong Kong’s visionary entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Gordon Wu.

Surviving Lai are his wife of more than 50 years (Fung-Yee), their three children (Bertha, David, Leo), and five grandchildren who were his greatest pride. We were lucky to have crossed his path. He will be greatly missed but forever remembered.

Arthur Cohen

Arthur Cohen, a brilliant applied and mathematical statistician and a wonderful colleague and leader, passed away July 26, 2021.

Arthur spent his professional career at Rutgers from 1963 until he traded his title of distinguished professor for emeritus in 2017. A world-renowned leader in decision theory, he was known in the research world for blending dynamic applied statistical expertise with rigorous and creative mathematical skills. Among his colleagues, he was also revered for his integrity, geniality, incisiveness, and unending passion for statistics.

Arthur was born in 1933 and later attended Brooklyn College, where he was captain of the basketball team. One professor there suggested Arthur might try graduate school in statistics at Columbia University, to which he could commute from home. That bit of serendipity launched his career.

Arthur interrupted his graduate studies to spend two years with the Epidemiology Intelligence Service in what was then the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) as a “disease detective.” After returning to Columbia, he wrote a dissertation under Ted Anderson involving admissible estimators, a major topic over his career.

Soon after he joined Rutgers, Arthur became department chair. With a long reign as chair followed by other essential roles, he was instrumental in building up statistics into the leading department it is today, although he once claimed one thing he loved about Rutgers was he could pretend the administration didn’t exist and the administration thought he didn’t exist. Arthur was known to be an inspiring and caring teacher. He supervised several students, who themselves are now leaders.

In addition to his service at Rutgers, Arthur provided outstanding service to the statistics profession, including serving as editor of the Annals of Statistics, co-editor of the Journal of Multivariate Analysis, and associate editor of several other journals.

Arthur developed wide-ranging and fundamental results in decision theory, admissibility, Bayes procedures, sequential tests, order restricted inference, and multiple testing. One of his longtime collaborators Harold Sackrowitz said, “His research was always guided by relevance to the area. He preceded Google as a search engine for his breadth of knowledge of people and work across statistics.” Among other distinctions, Arthur was honored as a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, American Statistical Association, and International Statistical Institute.

Arthur will be greatly missed for his enormous intellect, kindness, and optimism. He leaves behind his loving wife of 64 years, Anita; his devoted son, Richmond; his daughter, Elizabeth; and his cherished grandchildren, Genevieve and Troy Arthur.

The department of statistics at Rutgers University will establish the Arthur Cohen Lecture as one of the major annual events of the department. The Rutgers flag will fly at half-mast on November 5, 2021, in his memory. A virtual memorial gathering was held September 17, 2021, and a celebratory research conference with colleagues, students, and family members will be held in Arthur’s honor at Rutgers University on January 14, 2022.

For more information about the memorial session during the research conference, contact the department of statistics at Rutgers.

Charles Berlin Sampson

Charles Berlin Sampson passed away at home in Carmel, Indiana, July 22, 2021. Sampson was born December 15, 1939, in Iowa Falls, Iowa, and grew up on a farm south of Radcliffe, Iowa. He graduated from Radcliffe High School in 1957, from the University of Iowa (1961 – BA Mathematics, 1963 – MS Mathematics), and from Iowa State University (1968 – PhD Biostatistics).

Sampson joined Eli Lilly & Company in 1968. During his 26-year career there, he was active in shaping the growth of the use of statistics in the pharmaceutical industry. He became Lilly’s first director of statistics. He was also a leader in establishing the American Statistical Association’s Biopharmaceutical Section and co-founded the Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Rock Steady Boxing or Iowa State University Foundation for the Sampson Legacy Fund for Excellence in Statistics.

Joel Verter

Joel Verter passed away August 13, 2021, after suffering from amyloidosis.

Verter joined the Biometrics Research Branch (a predecessor of the Office of Biostatistics Research) of the National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, NHLBI) in 1967 as a member of the Public Health Service, eventually reaching the rank of captain. While there, he earned his PhD in biostatistics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation dealt with development of methods applicable to the Framingham Study.

During his long and illustrious career at the branch, Verter was involved in many of the seminal randomized controlled trials sponsored by NHBLI. In his early years, he was influential in MRFIT and other cardiovascular trials. In later years, he made important contributions to trials like PEPI, a study of cardiovascular disease in women that was the precursor to the Women’s Health Initiative.

Verter played a foundational role in the design and analysis of trials developed by the blood division. He was highly respected by other members of the branch, the institute as a whole, and investigators funded by NHLBI and twice served as acting branch chief during periods between a branch chief’s leaving and a new one’s joining.

In January of 1991, Verter left NHLBI to assume a senior position in biostatistics at Henry Ford Hospital. He returned to the DC area in 1992 to join the biostatistics research faculty at The George Washington University, where he served for 10 years (1992–2002).

In 2002, Verter joined Statistics Collaborative, a well-known DC statistical consulting firm, as a senior investigator and led a variety of activities for randomized trials in cardiovascular and other diseases. He retired in 2014.

Verter is survived by his loving family—his wife, Judy; his daughters, Hillary and Kristen; and his five grandchildren. All of us who knew him will miss his warmth, kindness, and empathy.