Conference on Advances in Multiple Testing Honors Sarkar

Edoardo M. Airoldi, Zhigen Zhao, and Jie Chen

The department of statistics, operations, and data science at Temple University hosted the Conference on Advances in Multiple Testing June 1 in honor of Sanat K. Sarkar for his 70th birthday and 40 years of service to the university.

Sarkar is an internationally recognized scholar who has made fundamental contributions to the development of multiple testing methodology and its applications in modern scientific investigations. He is an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served on the editorial boards of such journals as The Annals of Statistics, The American Statistician, and Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics. Additionally, he was awarded the Musser Award for excellence in research by the Fox School of Business and inducted several times to the Dean’s Research Honor Roll at Temple University.

The conference started with opening remarks by Edoardo M. Airoldi, chair of the department, and Sudipta Basu, associate dean of the school of business, followed by the keynote by Yoav Benjamini, who shared his insights on selective inference in medical science, math, and politics. He reviewed the connection between replicability issues and selective inference that led the attack on the p-value and statistical significance and the responses of the ASA, and then discussed approaches to address selective inference, emphasizing some of Sarkar’s mathematical contributions to the area. The rest of the conference program was filled by 10 invited presentations given by Sarkar’s collaborators and professional friends, focusing on the following:

• Multiple testing under dependence (William Fithian and Aaditya Ramdas)
• Large-scale multiple testing (Etienne Roquain and Werner Brannath)
• Multiple testing on structure data (Jiangtao Gou, Marina Bogomolov, and Wenge Guo)
• Multiple testing methodology and applications (Ajit C. Tamhane, Xiongzhi Chen, and Thorsten Dickhaus)

A panel discussion with Dror Rom, Venkat Sethuraman, and Jie Chen highlighted the applications of multiple testing in the biopharmaceutical industry.

The conference brought together about 80 participants worldwide—mostly from academia and industry—including many of Sarkar’s students, collaborators, and professional friends. It concluded with remarks from Sarkar, who shared results of his recent research in multiple testing.

A subsequent banquet was held with Sarkar’s family. At the banquet, Sarkar’s PhD adviser, Bimal K. Sinha, statistics professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, shared a story about the time they spent together. It ended with cheers, champagne, and messages for future research directions in multiple testing.