The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second-oldest continuously operating professional society in the U.S. behind the Massachusetts Medical Society. ASA services statisticians, quantitative scientists, and users of statistics across many academic areas and applications. The association publishes a variety of journals and sponsors several international conferences every year.
Prof. Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He was professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and research professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao was honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002. The American Statistical Association has described him as "a living legend" whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine." The Times of India listed Rao as one of the top 10 Indian scientists of all time.
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 Presidents' Award is generally regarded as one of the highest honours in the field of statistics, along with the International Prize in Statistics.
Peter McCullagh is a Northern Irish-born American statistician and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago.
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$2,000. 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.
Chien-Fu Jeff Wu is a Taiwanese-American statistician. He 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 Machine Learning, 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.
Jun S. Liu is a Chinese-American statistician focusing on Bayesian statistical inference, statistical machine learning, and computational biology. He was assistant professor of statistics at Harvard University from 1991 to 1994. From 1994 to 2004, he was Assistant, Associate, and full Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Since 2000, Liu has been Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University and held a courtesy appointment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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.
Iain Murray Johnstone is an Australian born statistician who is the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor in Quantitative Science in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.
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.
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:
Francesca Dominici is a Harvard Professor who develops methodology in causal inference and data science and leads research projects that combine big data with health policy and climate change. She is a professor of biostatistics, director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and a former senior associate dean for research in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics awards innovations in statistical research with impact on society. This biennial prize is awarded in even years, and consists of a medal, a certificate, and a monetary reward of US$1,000,000, similar to the Nobel Prize in other disciplines. The home institution of the Prize is the King Baudouin Foundation (KBF) in Belgium, which appoints the international jury and carries out the selection procedure. The award money comes from the Rousseeuw Foundation created by the statistician Peter Rousseeuw.
Veronika Ročková is a Bayesian statistician. Born in Czechoslovakia, and educated in the Czech Republic, Belgium, and the Netherlands, she works in the US as a professor of econometrics and statistics and James S. Kemper Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago. Her research studies methods including variable selection, high-dimensional inference, non-convex optimization, likelihood-free inference, and the spike-and-slab LASSO, and also includes applications in biomedical statistics.
