Katherine Ensor

Crowdsourcing the Innovations

Have you registered for JSM 2022? After two years of virtual JSMs, I am eager (actually more than eager—let me dare use the word thrilled) to come together and celebrate our contributions in Washington, DC.

As the ASA president, I had the privilege of selecting this year’s JSM theme. I chose Statistics: A Foundation for Innovation to recognize the essential contributions of our discipline. I am continuing with this theme through my presidential address, titled “Celebrating Statistical Foundations Driving 21st-Century Innovation.” Participating in JSM has shaped my professional identity, and I am grateful for the opportunities to give the presidential address and select the president’s invited speaker.

At JSM 2022, important contributions will be recognized by featured speakers, including David L. Banks of Duke University (Deming Lecture), Madhu Mazumdar of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (COPSS Elizabeth L. Scott Lecture), Dylan Small of the University of Pennsylvania and Huixia Judy Wang of The George Washington University (Medallion Lectures), and Nancy Reid of the University of Toronto (COPSS Distinguished Achievement Lecture).

With your help, I plan to showcase our contributions in my JSM talk, which might include the following:

• The foundational impact of statistics on the development and implementation of autonomous vehicles as explored by a working group convened by 2019 ASA President Karen Kafadar
• The Statistical Significance series, developed in 2017 by ASA sections and the Scientific and Public Affairs Committee to highlight the contributions statisticians make to society—from health care and the economy to national security and the environment
• Podcasts supported by the ASA such as the ASA Biopharm’s Podcast, Stats+Stories, and Practical Significance
• David Donoho’s Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics article, “Fifty Years of Data Science,” which illustrates the statistics community’s long-term development and contributions to this dynamic area
• Andrew Gelman and Aki Vehtarib’s Journal of the American Statistical Association article, “What Are the Most Important Statistical Ideas of the Past 50 Years?” that identified counterfactual causal inference, bootstrapping and simulation-based inference, overparameterized models and regularization, Bayesian multilevel models, generic computation algorithms, adaptive decision analysis, robust inference, and exploratory data analysis

Moving to my next piece of exciting JSM news, I am delighted to announce that Reginald DesRoches, who has served as Rice University’s provost since 2020 and will become its eighth president in July, has agreed to be my invited speaker. DesRoches first joined Rice as dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering. He came to Rice from Georgia Tech, where he served as chair of civil and environmental engineering, leading that department to No. 2 in the nation.

At Rice, the statistics department resides in engineering, so DesRoches knows our community well. We have seen significant growth in statistics and data science under his leadership, as he is a strong voice for the foundational and important contributions provided by our field. He has been an exceptional proven and transformative leader since day one, and I am simply thrilled (there I go using that word again) that he has agreed to speak to our community. I guarantee you will enjoy his invited address and leave with a forward perspective of how we collectively contribute to a better society.

Let me provide a bit more introduction of provost and soon to be president DesRoches. His primary research interests are in the design of resilient infrastructure systems under extreme loads and the application of smart materials. His research is highly interdisciplinary and spans micro- to macro-scales. He has published approximately 300 articles and delivered more than 100 presentations in more than 30 countries. As someone who studies risk and resilience, he has a strong appreciation for the importance of statics in many fields, including his own.

DesRoches is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has been recognized for both the impact and innovation of his research. He received the Distinguished Arnold Kerr Lecturer Award in 2019 and the John A. Blume Distinguished Lecturer Award and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Distinguished Lecturer Award—one of the highest honors in the field of earthquake engineering—in 2018. He is also a recipient of the 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award, the 2007 ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, and the Georgia Tech ANAK Award, which is the highest honor the Georgia Tech student body can bestow on a faculty member.

DesRoches is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Alumni in Civil Engineering at Berkeley and was recently named an honorary alumnus of Georgia Tech. A fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the society’s Structural Engineering Institute, he served as the key technical leader in the United States’ response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, taking a team of 28 engineers, architects, city planners, and social scientists to study the impact of the earthquake. He chairs the National Institute of Standards and Technology National Construction Safety Team Advisory Committee and is on the California Department of Transportation Seismic Advisory Board.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, DesRoches grew up in Queens, New York. He earned his bachelor of science in mechanical engineering and master of science in civil engineering degrees and a doctorate in structural engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

As I have had the opportunity to engage with departments, sections, and chapters, my belief that statistics is a foundation of innovation has been affirmed and strengthened. I look forward to celebrating our discipline at JSM 2022 in Washington, DC.