Susan Murphy Wins Boston Chapter’s Top Award

Wenting Cheng, Chapter President; Olga Vitek Chapter Past President; and Tom Lane, Chapter Treasurer

The Boston Chapter marks the 35th anniversary of the Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award this year. Since 1990, this annual award has recognized a distinguished statistician who has made exceptional contributions to the statistics field through research, teaching, and service to the statistical community, especially including service to the Boston Chapter.

Susan A. Murphy, Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and Computer Science and associate faculty at the Kempner Institute of Harvard University, was honored with the award this year. She was recognized for her groundbreaking research, which focuses on improving sequential decision-making in health—currently in online, real-time learning algorithms for developing personalized digital health interventions.

Murphy is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and US National Academy of Medicine. She is also a fellow of the college on problems in drug dependence. In 2013, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on experimental designs to inform sequential decision-making. She made an impact on the real-world practice of clinical trials in medical and behavior science through her research, as well as through her efforts to promote adaptive interventions.

Murphy’s service to the professional community is equally commendable. Her leadership as the former president of both the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and Bernoulli Society, former editor of Annals of Statistics, and former chair of the National Academy of Medicine Interest Group on Health and Technology highlights her longtime dedication to the field. She has served on many committees and review panels and trained a number of students and postdocs, many of whom have achieved faculty positions in leading statistics departments and received student paper awards.

The Boston Chapter held an evening reception April 12 at the Harvard University Science and Engineering Complex to celebrate the award. The reception began with a dinner that gathered the awardee and members of the Boston Chapter community, as well as Murphy’s colleagues, students, and postdocs.

After the dinner, Chapter President Wenting Cheng introduced the chapter and told the award’s history. Xihong Lin—honored with the Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award in 2021—highlighted some of Murphy’s most impactful contributions and shared personal insights from her interactions with Murphy.

Murphy’s presentation, titled “Online Reinforcement Learning in Digital Health Interventions,” showcased her research on developing data analytic methods, particularly online reinforcement learning methods, for personalized digital health interventions. She discussed two examples of clinical trials involving digital health care apps: HeartSteps and Oralytics. This talk provided attendees with a deeper understanding of how Murphy’s integration of artificial intelligence with statistical methods is transforming health care interventions and advancing its future.

Award History

The Statistician of the Year Award was presented for the first time on December 9, 1989, to Charles Frederick Mosteller, then Harvard’s Lee Professor of Mathematical Statistics emeritus. On the eve of the inaugural award reception, the Harvard Crimson celebrated Mosteller with the article “Harvard Statistician Wins Prize – Frederick Mosteller Called ‘Greatest Living Bio-Statistician,’” noting Mosteller’s profound influence on the statistical field. The article quoted Jimmy Thomas Efird, then secretary of the Boston Chapter, who mentioned the award “is mostly to honor him [Mosteller] and show the recognition of his peers.”

In 1997, to commemorate Frederick Mosteller’s 80th birthday, the award was renamed in his honor. David Hoaglin was the first honoree to be recognized after the renaming. The following year, the March chapter newsletter announced Richard Goldstein as the recipient of the Mosteller Award and recognized the award’s previous recipients.

Frederick Mosteller’s Contribution to Statistics
Mosteller (December 24, 1916 – July 23, 2006) is regarded by some as one of the most influential statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chair of the Harvard Department of Statistics from 1957–1971, chair of the biostatistics department in the Harvard school of public health from 1977–1981, and chair of the health policy and management department in the Harvard school of public health from 1981–1987.

Mosteller’s leadership expanded far beyond his institution. He was a former president of the ASA (1967) and Institute for Mathematical Statistics (1974–1975), as well as president of the ASA Boston Chapter. He was also the only statistician to have served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1980).

Mosteller wrote 57 books, 365 papers in books and journals, and 60 other publications, many of which are classics. For example, his collaboration with David Wallace applied statistical analyses to solve the authorship puzzle of the anonymous Federalist Papers. Among his many achievements in statistics education, he wrote several teaching manuals and textbooks, including Probability: A First Course and Probability with Statistical Applications. He also taught a statistics class on “Continental Classroom – Mathematics” on NBC.

Honorees Over the Years
With Murphy’s recognition as the 2024 Mosteller Statistician of the Year awardee, the Boston Chapter adds another name to the list of statisticians who have been honored over the years:
Fred Mosteller, 1990
Herman Chernoff, 1991
Marvin Zelen, 1992
Ralph D’Agostino, 1993
William DuMouchel, 1994
Don Rubin, 1995
Nan Laird, 1996
David Hoaglin, 1997
Richard Goldstein, 1998
Arlene Ash, 1999
Cyrus Mehta, 2000
Alan Gelfand, 2001
Alan Zaslavsky, 2002
John D. McKenzie Jr., 2003
Louise Ryan, 2004
Mei-Ling Lee, 2005
Carl Morris, 2006
L.J. Wei, 2007
Richard DeVeaux, 2008
David Hosmer, 2009
Stephen Lagakos, 2010
Xiao-Li Meng, 2011
Katherine Halvorsen, 2012
Lisa Sullivan, 2013
Katherine Monti, 2014
Scott Evans, 2015
George Cobb, 2016
David Schoenfeld, 2017
Sharon-Lise Normand, 2018
Constantine Gatsonis, 2019
Eric Kolaczyk, 2020
Xihong Lin, 2021
Francesca Dominici, 2022
Nicholas Horton, 2023