Daksha Chokshi
Daksha Chokshi, a statistician at Aerojet Rocketdyne and one of the ASA’s longtime members, was recognized recently with a Rotary National Award for Space Achievement (RNASA) Late Career Stellar Award.
The RNASA Stellar awards are given annually to recognize heroes of the American space program at all stages of their careers. The winners are selected based on which accomplishments hold the greatest promise for furthering future activities in space.
Chokshi was recognized for her exceptional leadership and contributions to variation reduction and statistical evaluations for manned and unmanned rocket propulsion hardware over a long and illustrious career.
Rajan Patel
The Emory University Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics announces the 2021 winner of the Kutner Award to be Rajan Patel.
The Michael H. Kutner Alumni Award for Distinguished Service to the Discipline is given annually to a former Emory University Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics graduate student.
Patel earned his BS and MS degrees in computer science from Rice University in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He entered Emory’s doctoral program in biostatistics in 2002 and earned his doctoral degree from Emory in 2006, working under his adviser, DuBois Bowman. He developed novel statistical methods to analyze functional connectivity of the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Patel was selected by the department of biostatistics to be Emory’s first recipient of a Merck Company Scholarship in 2003 after his first year as a doctoral student.
Over the course of more than 14 years at Google, Patel has used his combination of statistical and computer science training to transform many of the products used across the world today. With Google Search, Patel developed the suite of experimentation tools we use thousands of times each year to make improvements to the core algorithms that power Search. From there, he led teams responsible for the freshness and topicality of search results. When you type a query to Google such as [who won the last Kutner award for distinguished service], the work he did to improve the freshness and topicality of Search is why we’re able to find the result showing the recent winner. This work affects more than a billion users every day.
Patel has always been unique in being able to combine his deep statistical understanding with his background in computer science to solve hard technical challenges, like understanding natural language in Search, or understanding images with Google Lens to build beautiful and simple products that have affected billions of users around the world. Beyond Search, he also applied these ideas to kick-off products like Gboard, the Android keyboard that autocorrects billions of words a day for hundreds of millions of users, and Google Podcasts, the best way to find and listen to audio on your phone.
What Patel has delivered doesn’t happen alone. Over the last 10 years, he has become an excellent leader of junior engineers, analysts, and product managers, growing and leading teams of more than 300 people to help build Search, Google Lens, ARCore, Gboard, Google Podcasts, and now consumer shopping experiences. For his contributions, Patel has been promoted through the ranks at Google, from a level 4 research scientist to the vice president of engineering in the consumer shopping group.
Prior to joining Google in 2007, Patel worked at Amgen, Inc. as a senior biostatistician and then a biostatistics manager for 2006 and 2007. At Amgen, he conducted statistical analyses for early-phase clinical trials and pre-clinical trials and wrote statistical analysis plans; contributed heavily to clinical trial protocols; and worked with physicians, data managers, and clinical trial specialists to run early-phase clinical trials.
Calyampudi Radhakrishna (C.R.) Rao
Calyampudi Radhakrishna (C.R.) Rao was recently awarded Honorary Membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for 2022. Each year, the IEEE Awards Board recommends a select group of recipients to receive IEEE’s most prestigious honors. These are the men and women whose exceptional achievements and outstanding contributions have made a lasting impact on technology, society, and the engineering profession.
Rao was honored for his contributions to fundamental statistical theories and their applications to engineering and science, particularly in signal processing and communications.
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