People News for July 2023

Robert E. Kass

Robert E. Kass, Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University, was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Kass holds faculty appointments at the neuroscience institute and in the department of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon. He is the co-author of Geometrical Foundations of Asymptotic Inference and Analysis of Neural Data and has written widely read articles about statistical education, including “Ten Simple Rules for Effective Statistical Practice.”

An active member of the ASA, Kass served as chair of the Bayesian Statistical Science Section. He also served as chair of the Statistics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founding editor-in-chief of the journal Bayesian Analysis, and executive editor of the international review journal Statistical Science.

Kaitlyn Ruth Dowden and Robert Tumasian

Members of the Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship Awards Committee recently chose Kaitlyn Ruth Dowden and Robert Tumasian as this year’s winners. Dowden is a graduate student at Penn State University. She will use her scholarship to research formally private methods for the quarterly census employment and wages data for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Tumasian, who was a graduate student at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, will use the scholarship to study composite estimands for use in phase III idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis clinical trials.

The scholarships were established in Wray Jackson Smith’s memory. He was a founding member of the ASA Government Statistics Section, and his career in government spanned four decades, including positions in the Office of Economic Opportunity, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and Energy Information Administration. After retiring from the federal government in 1983, he continued to play a role in federal statistics in the private sector.

The scholarship is awarded jointly by the ASA’s Social Statistics and Government Statistics sections. It is co-sponsored by the Washington Statistical Society, providing up to $1,000 to explore a variety of research opportunities.