Regina Liu grew up in Taiwan with an interest in pursuing applied mathematics and actuary science, but she fell in love with probability and statistics instead. She earned a PhD in statistics from Columbia University and became an assistant professor at Rutgers University. Now a distinguished professor at Rutgers, she has established herself as an outstanding researcher and is praised for providing exceptional service to the statistics and data science profession. She has served as an editor for many journals and was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 2020–2021. She has dedicated much effort to the outreach and promotion of junior researchers and under-represented groups and is credited for making the Rutgers Statistics Department the well-known and nurturing place it is today.
Taiwan
Christy Chuang-Stein
Christy Chuang-Stein grew up in an isolated city on the east coast of Taiwan. Both her parents were high-school teachers, and she remembers doing math lessons with her mother while other kids played outside. Yes, she resented the extra lessons at the time, but those lessons served her well and she ended up majoring in math in college. In the 90s, Chuang-Stein represented Pfizer (then Pharmacia) in presenting their HIV trial data at an FDA Antiviral Drugs Advisory Committee meeting to review statistical evidence for using viral load as a surrogate for clinical outcome in assessing HIV treatments. It is hard for her to describe the sense of exhilaration when her team’s endeavors lead to profound improvement in people’s lives.