Juliet Popper Shaffer

Last updated
Juliet Popper Shaffer
Born
Juliet Martha Popper

(1932-05-23) May 23, 1932 (age 91)
Education Swarthmore College
Stanford University
Spouse(s)John Walker Gray (1953-1955)
Harry George Shaffer (1960-1975)
Erich Leo Lehmann (1977-2009)
Scientific career
Institutions University of Kansas
University of California, Berkeley
Educational Testing Service
Doctoral advisor Robert Richardson Sears
Other academic advisors William Kaye Estes
Erich Leo Lehmann

Juliet Popper Shaffer (born May 23, 1932) is an American psychologist, statistician and statistics educator known for her research on multiple hypothesis testing. [1] She is a teaching professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. [2]

Contents

Education and career

Juliet Martha Popper was born in Brooklyn, and took four years of mathematics at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, a curriculum that was at that time intended only for boys. She did her undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, following the lead of classmate Arthur Mattuck, and despite the anti-women and anti-Jewish admission quotas then in place at Swarthmore. [3] After several changes of topic she ended up majoring in psychology and minoring in mathematics and philosophy. She graduated in 1953, married a classmate, and moved to Stanford University for graduate study in psychology. Her marriage broke up during her studies, but she completed her Ph.D. in psychology at in 1957. [1] [3] [4] She published a modified version of her dissertation, Motivational and social factors in children's perceptions of height, as Social and personality correlates of children's estimates of height with Journal Press in 1964. [5]

After postdoctoral studies with William Kaye Estes at Indiana University, she joined the faculty in psychology at the University of Kansas. At Kansas, Popper was involved with local struggles for desegregation, and became the first chair of the university's Affirmative Action Board. During this time she married her second husband, Harry G. Shaffer, another faculty member who already had children. [6] She was informed at the time of their marriage that, because of Kansas's anti-nepotism rules, only one of her or her husband could win tenure, but this rule was changed when she finally went up for tenure, a year late because having children made her department think she wasn't serious about psychology. The part-time teaching schedule she followed while raising her children delayed her chances for taking a sabbatical, but finally, in 1973, she was allowed to take a sabbatical at Berkeley, under the supervision of Erich Leo Lehmann. In the same year she divorced her husband. [3]

In 1977 she married Lehmann and moved to Berkeley. The psychology department there was not hiring, so she took a visiting position at the University of California, Davis and then a year later became a lecturer in statistics at Berkeley. At Berkeley, she also ran a "drop-in consulting service", and by 1981 achieved security of employment, the equivalent of tenure for lecturers. [1] [3] She retired in 1994, and spent several of the following years as a researcher at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. [1]

Research

Shaffer's work in psychology at Kansas involved learning theory, personality, and perception. She also developed experimental designs to test the theories of a colleague, Fritz and Grace Heider, involving the ways in which the personal connection between two people can influence the transmission of a feeling towards another object from one of the two people to the other. Later at Kansas, she became interested in the multiple comparisons problem in statistics, where using the same experiment to make multiple inferences can cause a greater likelihood of erroneous inferences, after observing this effect in student work; it would become the main research topic of her later career. [3]

Lehmann writes that Shaffer "became one of the leaders" in the field of multiple comparisons, with her "two most importance contributions" occurring in connection with a psychological experiment in which she observed the non-transitivity of significant differences in multiple comparisons. Of three ordered conditions in the experiment, the smaller and the larger conditions had significantly different outcomes from each other, but neither was significantly different from the middle condition. This paradoxical outcome led Shaffer to classify the allowable patterns of significant differences and to find interpretations of those patterns, and led others to perform follow-up research making her methods more implementable in practice. Another of her results in this area was the observation that, in analyzing multiple comparisons, it is important to include in the analysis type III errors, in which one rejects the null hypothesis but concludes that an effect has the opposite sign to its actual sign. [1]

Recognition

In 1988, Shaffer was elected to be a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the American Psychological Association. [3] She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. [1] [3] In 2003, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies gave her their Florence Nightingale David Award "for her pioneering contributions to statistical methods in education and psychometrics; for her exceptional role in fostering opportunities for and in support of the advancement of women in the sciences". [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Design of experiments</span> Design of tasks

The design of experiments, also known as experiment design or experimental design, is the design of any task that aims to describe and explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation. The term is generally associated with experiments in which the design introduces conditions that directly affect the variation, but may also refer to the design of quasi-experiments, in which natural conditions that influence the variation are selected for observation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Statistics</span> Study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data

Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.

The theory of statistics provides a basis for the whole range of techniques, in both study design and data analysis, that are used within applications of statistics. The theory covers approaches to statistical-decision problems and to statistical inference, and the actions and deductions that satisfy the basic principles stated for these different approaches. Within a given approach, statistical theory gives ways of comparing statistical procedures; it can find a best possible procedure within a given context for given statistical problems, or can provide guidance on the choice between alternative procedures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Statistical hypothesis test</span> Method of statistical inference

A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data sufficiently support a particular hypothesis. A statistical hypothesis test typically involves a calculation of a test statistic. Then a decision is made, either by comparing the test statistic to a critical value or equivalently by evaluating a p-value computed from the test statistic. Roughly 100 specialized statistical tests have been defined.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematical statistics</span> Branch of statistics

Mathematical statistics is the application of probability theory, a branch of mathematics, to statistics, as opposed to techniques for collecting statistical data. Specific mathematical techniques which are used for this include mathematical analysis, linear algebra, stochastic analysis, differential equations, and measure theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Blackwell</span> American mathematician and statistician

David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.

Quantitative psychology is a field of scientific study that focuses on the mathematical modeling, research design and methodology, and statistical analysis of psychological processes. It includes tests and other devices for measuring cognitive abilities. Quantitative psychologists develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.

Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David was an English statistician. She was head of the Statistics Department at the University of California, Riverside between 1970 – 77 and her research interests included the history of probability and statistical ideas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erich Leo Lehmann</span> American statistician (1917–2009)

Erich Leo Lehmann was a German-born American statistician, who made a major contribution to nonparametric hypothesis testing. He is one of the eponyms of the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and of the Hodges–Lehmann estimator of the median of a population.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David A. Freedman</span>

David Amiel Freedman was Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a distinguished mathematical statistician whose wide-ranging research included the analysis of martingale inequalities, Markov processes, de Finetti's theorem, consistency of Bayes estimators, sampling, the bootstrap, and procedures for testing and evaluating models. He published extensively on methods for causal inference and the behavior of standard statistical models under non-standard conditions – for example, how regression models behave when fitted to data from randomized experiments. Freedman also wrote widely on the application—and misapplication—of statistics in the social sciences, including epidemiology, public policy, and law.

Pranab Kumar Sen was an Indian-American statistician who was a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tandy Warnow</span> American computer scientist (active 1984–)

Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is known for her work on the reconstruction of evolutionary trees, both in biology and in historical linguistics, and also for multiple sequence alignment methods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bin Yu</span> Chinese-American statistician

Bin Yu is a Chinese-American statistician. She is currently Chancellor's Professor in the Departments of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jean Yee Hwa Yang is an Australian statistician known for her work on variance reduction for microarrays, and for inferring proteins from mass spectrometry data. Yang is a Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney.

Claudia Czado is a mathematical statistician at the Technical University of Munich, known for her research on copulas, vines, and their applications in statistical finance.

Cavell Brownie is a Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the North Carolina State University. Her research considered biometric methods and wildlife sampling.

Eva Petkova is a Bulgarian-American biostatistician interested in the application of statistics to psychiatry, and known for her research on regression model comparison, brain imaging, and mental disorders. She is a professor of population health and of child and adolescent psychology at the New York University School of Medicine, and a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Panaretos</span> Greek mathematical statistician

Victor Michael Panaretos is a Greek mathematical statistician. He is currently Professor and Director at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he holds the chair of Mathematical Statistics.

Ajit C. Tamhane is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS) at Northwestern University and also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Statistics.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lehmann, E. L. (2008), "59. Juliet P. Shaffer (b. 1932)", Reminiscences of a Statistician, New York: Springer, pp. 212–216, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-71597-1_13, ISBN   978-0-387-71596-4, MR   2367933
  2. Faculty, University of California, Berkeley Department of Statistics, archived from the original on 2017-11-17, retrieved 2017-11-16
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Robinson, Dan (January 2005), "Profiles in Research: Juliet Popper Shaffer", Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 30 (1): 93–103, doi:10.3102/10769986030001093, S2CID   220338997
  4. Juliet Popper Shaffer at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. Shaffer, Juliet Popper (1964-08-20), "Social and personality correlates of children's estimates of height", SearchWorks catalog, Genetic psychology monographs, vol. 70, Stanford University, pp. 97–134, PMID   14194338 , retrieved 2017-11-16
  6. Shaffer, Harry G.; Shaffer, Juliet P. (January 1966). "Job Discrimination against Faculty Wives: Restrictive Employment Practices in Colleges and Universities". The Journal of Higher Education. 37 (1): 10–15. doi:10.1080/00221546.1966.11774524. ISSN   0022-1546.
  7. Florence Nightingale David Award, Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, retrieved 2017-11-16