With a PhD in statistical astrophysics, David Corliss is the principal data scientist at Grafham Analytics and founder of Peace-Work.
The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, known as COPSS, recently opened nominations for its 2025 leadership awards. These are distinguished awards recognizing both early-career and senior accomplishments in the theory and practice of statistics. As a member of the committee for the emerging leaders award, I have seen how the committee’s work—and especially these awards—recognize and promote outstanding accomplishments. Additionally, Data for Good is strongly represented.
COPSS is an association of professional societies that promotes discovery and practice in the statistical sciences. Members include the American Statistical Association, International Biometric Society—both Eastern North American and Western North American regions—Statistical Society of Canada, and Institute of Mathematical Statistics. With each society having a distinct character and mission, the committee works across organizations on shared interests and goals such as promoting statistics, awarding prizes and lectureships, and increasing intersociety communication.
COPSS awards focus on the impact of statistical theory and practice. While this doesn’t specifically target Data for Good, the high visibility and impact of D4G means there is often a strong connection between the two—as the old saying goes, “doing well by doing good.” Let’s take a closer look at the awards and some of the recent recipients and you will see what I mean.
Presidents’ Award
The COPSS Presidents’ Award recognizes a younger statistician who has made outstanding contributions to the profession. The 2024 honoree is Veronika Rockova of The University of Chicago, who also received the COPSS Emerging Leader Award in 2023. Much of her important work is at the intersection of Bayesian and frequentists methods, strengthening the tool set applied to many problems, including Data for Good.
Distinguished Achievement Award
The COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award recognizes the highly significant impact of statistical methods on scientific investigations and includes a lecture given at the Joint Statistical Meetings. This year, the award recognized the work of Robert Tibshirani at Stanford, including his groundbreaking work in developing LASSO regression. At the reception following the lecture, I had a chance to talk with Tibshirani, who offered his thoughts about sorting through the 2 million or so multicollinear poverty metrics now available to help identify which factors are most closely association with a particular issue.
Elizabeth L. Scott Award and Lecture
The Elizabeth L. Scott Award and Lecture, awarded in even-numbered years, honors Scott’s lifelong efforts to further the careers of women in academia, including equal pay and recognition for their work. As a statistical astrophysicist, my D4G work on bias traces directly back to Scott’s work on sample bias in observations of galaxy clusters.
The 2024 award honors the work of Regina Liu of Rutgers for her leadership in developing careers and creating supportive work environment for underrepresented groups and new researchers, as well as her work in nonparametric statistics.
Florence N. David Award and Lectureship and George W. Snedecor Award
In odd-numbered years (nominations now being accepted for the 2025 awards), COPSS presents the Florence N. David Award and Lectureship to a female statistician who serves as a role model to other women and the George W. Snedecor Award to a researcher in biometry with an important advance published within three years of the date of the award.
Emerging Leader Award
The COPSS Emerging Leader Award is presented annually to up to eight early-career statistical scientists demonstrating outstanding leadership that will shape research and applications in statistics and data science for years to come. The award recipients are distinguished for contributions to statistical theory and applications, as well as mentoring, education, and service. As in all COPSS awards, the Emerging Leader Award—with its recognition of ground-breaking innovation in statistical science combined with service and leadership—make it a natural fit for distinguished accomplishments in Data for Good.
Getting Involved
In opportunities this month, nominations for the 2025 COPSS awards are open. Nomination packages are due December 15, so now is the time to work with your colleagues to recommend people.
Also this month, the ASA Government Statistics, Survey Research Methods, and Social Statistics sections are sponsoring a student paper competition for student and post-graduate papers. The winners will present their papers in a topic-contributed session at JSM 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee. Applications are due by November 15.
Leave a Reply