The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) comprises the presidents, past presidents and presidents-elect of the following, primarily Northern American, professional societies of statisticians: [1]
It also includes the president-elect-elect of Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the past-past-president of the Statistical Society of Canada. [1]
COPSS is responsible for granting the following awards: [2]
Gertrude Mary Cox was an American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later appointed director of both the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina and the Statistics Research Division of North Carolina State University. Her most important and influential research dealt with experimental design; In 1950 she published the book Experimental Designs, on the subject with W. G. Cochran, which became the major reference work on the design of experiments for statisticians for years afterwards. In 1949 Cox became the first woman elected into the International Statistical Institute and in 1956 was President of the American Statistical Association.
Stephen Elliott Fienberg was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, Heinz College, and Cylab at Carnegie Mellon University. Fienberg was the founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application and of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.
The COPSS Presidents' Award is given annually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a young statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics.
The COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship is a very high recognition of achievement and scholarship in statistical science that recognizes the highly significant impact of statistical methods on scientific investigations. The award was funded in 1963 by the North American Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) "to honor both the contributions of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher and the work of a present–day statistician for their advancement of statistical theory and applications." The COPSS Starting in 1964, the Distinguished Lecture is given at the Joint Statistical Meetings in North America and is subsequently published in a statistics journal. The lecturer receives a plaque and a cash award of US$1000. It is given every year if a nominee considered eligible and worthy is found, which one was in all but five years up to 1984, and in all years since. In June 2020, the name of the award was changed to its current name after discussions concerning Fisher's controversial views on race and eugenics.
Tianwen Tony Cai is a Chinese statistician. He is the Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Statistics and Vice Dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also professor of Applied Math & Computational Science Graduate Group, and associate scholar at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. In 2008 Tony Cai was awarded the COPSS Presidents' Award.
Chien-Fu Jeff Wu is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on the convergence of the EM algorithm, resampling methods such as the bootstrap and jackknife, and industrial statistics, including design of experiments, and robust parameter design.
Jianqing Fan is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics, and a former Chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (2012–2015) and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies (2005-2017) at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.
Nancy Margaret Reid is a Canadian theoretical statistician. She is a professor at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory. In 2015 Reid became Director of the Canadian Institute for Statistical Sciences.
Xiao-Li Meng is a Chinese American statistician and the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard University. He received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2001. He has written numerous research papers about Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and other statistical methodology.
Jun S. Liu is a Chinese-American statistician focusing on Bayesian statistical inference and computational biology. He received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2002. Liu is a professor in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University and has written many research papers and a book about Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms, including their applications in biology. He is also co-author of the Tmod software for sequence motif discovery.
Michael Abbott Newton is a Canadian statistician. He is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and he received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2004. He has written many research papers about the statistical analysis of cancer biology, including linkage analysis and signal identification.
Larry Alan Wasserman is a Canadian-American statistician and a professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science and the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.
Xihong Lin is a Chinese-American statistician known for her contributions to mixed models, nonparametric and semiparametric regression, and statistical genetics and genomics. As of 2015, she is the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Coordinating Director of the Program in Quantitative Genomics.
Raymond James Carroll is an American statistician, and Distinguished Professor of statistics, nutrition and toxicology at Texas A&M University. He is a recipient of 1988 COPSS Presidents' Award and 2002 R. A. Fisher Lectureship. He has made fundamental contributions to measurement error model, nonparametric and semiparametric modeling.
Lynne Billard is an Australian statistician and professor at the University of Georgia, known for her statistics research, leadership, and advocacy for women in science. She has served as president of the American Statistical Association, and the International Biometric Society, one of a handful of people to have led both organizations.
Marvin Zelen was Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science. During the 1980s, Zelen chaired HSPH's Department of Biostatistics. Among colleagues in the field of statistics, he was widely known as a leader who shaped the discipline of biostatistics. He "transformed clinical trial research into a statistically sophisticated branch of medical research."
The International Prize in Statistics is awarded every two years to an individual or team "for major achievements using statistics to advance science, technology and human welfare". The International Prize in Statistics, along with the COPSS Presidents' Award, are the two highest honours in the field of Statistics.
Jane F. Gentleman was an American-Canadian statistician, the second female president of the Statistical Society of Canada, and the first winner of the Janet L. Norwood Award For Outstanding Achievement By A Woman In The Statistical Sciences.
Charmaine B. Dean is a statistician from Trinidad. She is the vice president for research at the University of Waterloo, a professor of statistical and actuarial sciences at both Waterloo and Western University, the former president of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society, the former President of the Statistical Society of Canada. Her research interests include longitudinal studies, survival analysis, spatiotemporal data, heart surgery, and wildfires.
Susan S. Ellenberg is an American statistician specializing in the design of clinical trials and in the safety of medical products. She is a professor of biostatistics, medical ethics and health policy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 1993 president of the Society for Clinical Trials and the 1999 President of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society.