Nagambal Shah

Nagambal Shah is the recipient of the 2023 AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award. This award honors individuals who have mentored significant numbers of underrepresented students.

Kimberly Sellers (left) congratulates Nagambal Shah, who received a standing ovation during the AAAS Awards Ceremony that took place in early March during the AAAS meetings in Washington, DC.

“I am so proud and humbled to receive this unique award, thank you AAAS,” said Shah in a tweet. “I would also like to thank all my mentees for taking this journey with me.”

As a long-time mathematics professor at Spelman College, Shah—known as “Mama Shah”—has mentored countless women, encouraging them to pursue graduate-level work in STEM while advising them through their undergraduate research development, conference presentations, and undergraduate theses.

Beyond her imprint at Spelman, Shah has been active in the ASA community. She founded StatFest in 2001, served as chair of the ASA’s Committee on Minorities in Statistics, and helped develop the ASA’s Diversity Workshop and Mentoring Program—a multi-day program held in conjunction with the Joint Statistical Meetings during which early-career statisticians are partnered with senior-level statistician mentors.

Nancy Reid

For contributions to the foundations of statistics that significantly advanced the frontiers of statistics and for insight that transformed understanding of parametric statistical inference, Nancy Reid is the inaugural recipient of the David R. Cox Foundations of Statistics Award, presented by the American Statistical Association. Reid will formally receive the award and deliver a lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto in August.

Nancy Reid

Reid, university professor of statistical sciences at the University of Toronto, co-authored with David Cox a 1987 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B discussion paper titled “Parameter Orthogonality and Approximate Conditional Inference.” With this paper, and subsequent work with Cox and others, Reid has made major contributions to higher-order inference and various aspects of conditioning.

In addition to her work in foundational areas of statistics, Reid has successfully pursued numerous other lines of research, contributing to experimental design, nonparametric statistics, robust statistics, and comparisons and contradictions between Bayesian and frequentist inference.

The David R. Cox Foundations of Statistics Award was created in 2022 through an endowment created by Deborah G. Mayo, professor emerita of philosophy at Virginia Tech. The ASA presents the award in odd-numbered years. The recipient receives a $2,000 honorarium and is invited to give a lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings.

Anyone interested in supporting the ASA’s effort to increase the size of the award through donations that may be matched by the donor and friends of David Cox is encouraged to contact Ron Wasserstein, ASA executive director.

Peihua Qiu

Peihua Qiu, dean’s professor and founding chair of the department of biostatistics at the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions, has been elected a 2022 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Qiu is among more than 500 scientists, including 19 at the University of Florida, in the 2022 AAAS Fellow class. They are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements by the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

“We are incredibly proud of Dr. Qiu and his selection as [an] AAAS Fellow, one of the highest honors granted to scientists,” said Beth A. Virnig, dean of the College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Dr. Qiu is a nationally and internationally recognized thought leader, whose work has led to many important advances in statistical science and health research.”

Qiu was selected in recognition of distinguished contributions to the statistics field and its applications, particularly in jump regression analysis, image processing, statistical process control, survival analysis, disease screening, and disease surveillance. He has published two research monographs and more than 150 research papers in refereed journals in these areas.

He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, American Society for Quality, and Institute of Mathematical Statistics, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served as associate editor for many top statistical journals, including the Journal of the
American Statistical Association and Biometrics, and as the editor of Technometrics.

Among Qiu’s current research projects is the development of a rigorous disease outbreak surveillance and detection system that can help public health officials contain disease outbreaks at their source, avoiding widespread health and economic impacts. Qiu co-leads the project, which is supported by a U grant from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A tradition dating back to 1874, election as an AAAS Fellow is a lifetime honor.

Lynne Billard and Elizabeth Thompson

ASA members Lynne Billard and Elizabeth Thompson were awarded honorary life membership in the International Biometric Society during the 2022 International Biometric Conference in Riga, Latvia.

Billard, a former IBS president, was honored for her tireless efforts to advance women and other marginalized professionals during her nearly five decades of commitment to IBS.

Thompson was also honored for her commitment to IBS through the years and her research in statistical genetics and pedigree analysis. She served as IBS president from 2016–2017.

Learn about the International Biometrics Society.