Peter Parker, Award Committee Chair
Scott Vander Wiel of Los Alamos National Laboratories has received the 2025 Gerald J. Hahn Quality & Productivity Achievement Award.
Over the course of Vander Wiel’s 35-year career, he has made major contributions to quality and productivity in both the industrial and government sectors. He started as an intern at General Electric, working with Gerry Hahn, then joined the technical staff at Bell Laboratories before his current work at Los Alamos National Laboratories, Vander Wiel has contributed myriad influential advancements to methods for addressing complex data and quality challenges for industrial process improvement.
Vander Wiel’s innovative extensions of traditional statistical process control methods applied to dynamic systems under active feedback control, along with his advancements of network tomography, and improvement to quantile estimation resulted in process monitoring and quality improvement that resulted in annually saving over $1M at Bell Laboratories. His extensive publications and patents while there garnered high citation rates and led to invitations to speak at national and international events. During his time in the industrial sector at Bell Laboratories, he exemplified the traits of the Gerald J. Hahn Quality & Productivity Achievement Award, contributing outstanding, lasting, and measurable solutions to quality and productivity improvement.
In the government sector throughout his tenure at LANL, Vander Wiel has had a profound and positive impact on issues of quality and productivity. He has been a leader in developing and promoting novel statistical methods for uncertainty quantification in physical models of the US nuclear stockpile, nuclear forensics, fundamental nuclear data, materials performance, reliability, and rare events for defense applications. A key component of his work has focused on advancing methodology for assessing UQ for the Annual Assessment of the US nuclear stockpile. While much of his work at LANL cannot be openly published, Vander Wiel’s technical contributions have been internally recognized with multiple LANL Institutional Awards, United States Department of Energy awards, and with the Distinguished Achievement Award presented by the ASA Section on Defense and National Security. Both at Bell Laboratories and at LANL, Vander Wiel has led high-impact projects, providing technical direction, mentorship, and effective collaboration. Vander Wiel takes the role of mentoring seriously, and he has influenced future generations of applied statisticians, serving as senior mentor to over twenty early-career statisticians at LANL, all of whom have gone on to have successful and impactful careers. He has been recognized as a role model, inspiring his colleagues to think through problems in a structured and careful manner.
Vander Wiel is also known as a hardworking, generous, and community-minded individual who has contributed beyond his institutions. At LANL, Vander Wiel serves as guest lecturer in statistics for the Judicial Science School, which is an immersion course tailored for judges to provide them with background on modern scientific methods and interpretation of statistical claims.
In professional societies, Vander Wiel has served on the editorial board of Technometrics, he has served on numerous ASA program and award committees, and he regularly serves as referee for top applied statistics journals. Based on Scott’s many technical contributions and deep commitment to service, he was named a Fellow of the ASA in 2005.
As the Gerald Hahn Award recipient, Vander Wiel will give the quality & productivity plenary address at the Fall Technical Conference in October in Houston, Texas. Nominations for the 2026 award will be open later in the year.
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