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Lindsay Named Willaman Professor of Statistics

22 December 2004—Bruce G. Lindsay, Distinguished Professor of Statistics and director of the Center for Likelihood Studies, has been named Willaman Professor of Statistics in the Eberly College of Science. The Willaman Professorships were established in 1999 by Verne M. Willaman, a 1951 graduate of Penn State. The professorships provide a supplemental source of support for outstanding faculty members to provide them with the resources necessary to further their research, teaching, writing, and public service.

One focus of Lindsay's work is on likelihood-based statistical inferences, which are widely used in scientific data analyses. Making these inferences, however, can be a problem when the statistical model is cluttered with “nuisance parameters,” a result of the very broad sampling of information that is necessary to approximate the true state of nature. Lindsay has made several fundamental contributions to addressing major deficiencies that arise when applying standard statistical analyses under these conditions.

Lindsay also is recognized as having made major contributions to the foundations of statistical theory with methods he has developed for working with mixture models, in which the data collected comes from multiple distinct statistical modes, or a mixture of populations. His work in this area is recognized as a major contribution to the foundations of statistical theory. He also focuses on developing statistical methods that are useful to research in other scientific disciplines. In recent years he has worked on statistical challenges in the analysis of key biological data for genomic studies. A significant portion of his research is concerned with developing computer algorithms that allow researchers to make complex statistical analyses much faster.

Lindsay has served the Department of Statistics as interim department head in 1996 and as acting department head from 1998 to 2000. He currently is the director of the Center for Likelihood Studies and is the director of the Statistics Core of the Population Research Institute. He has served on many departmental committees, including the strategic planning committee, the promotion-and-tenure committee, and search committees for faculty and department heads. He also has served on college-wide committees such as the climate committee, the promotion-and-tenure committee, and the distinguished-professor selection committee. He currently is serving on the advising committee for the Penn State Arboretum.

Lindsay is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association. He also is a member of the Mathematical Association of America, the International Statistical Institute, and the Royal Statistical Society in the United Kingdom. He served on the panel for the National Research Council Committee on Fish Stock Assessment Methods from 1995 to 1997. In 2000 he served on the speaker-selection panel for the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences, and in 2002 on the proposal-evaluation panel for the National Science Foundation Probability and Statistics Program.

Lindsay has published 59 scientific papers, has contributed book reviews and proceeding articles to several publications, and has contributed entries to both the Encyclopedia of Statistics and the Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. He serves on editorial boards for Mathematical Methods of Statistics and Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. He was on the editorial board of the Annals of Statistics from 1985 to 1992 and again from 1994 to 1997, and he served on the editorial board for a special issue of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2002.

Lindsay has presented invited talks at scientific meetings around the world and at universities across the United States and in Canada, Belgium, Germany, and Australia. In 1990, he was the only speaker from the United States selected to give a special invited paper at a meeting of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 1993 he was chosen to deliver ten lectures as the principal speaker at a regional conference of the National Science Foundation Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences.

Lindsay’s scientific contributions have been recognized with a Humboldt Senior Scientist Research Award in 1990 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. In 1997 he was co-winner of the Snedecor Award given by the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies for the best paper in biometrics published during 1995 and 1996. In 1998 he received a certificate of recognition from the Penn State chapter of the scientific research society Sigma Xi for outstanding support of students doing research. He also has supervised 22 doctoral students, 13 of whom now are faculty members at other institutions of higher education.

Lindsay received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Oregon in 1969. He then studied at Yale University and served in the U.S. Coast Guard before earning his doctoral degree in biomathematics at the University of Washington in 1978. He joined the Penn State faculty in 1979 as an assistant professor of statistics, then was promoted to the position of associate professor in 1985 and to professor in 1987. He was named Distinguished Professor of Statistics in 1992.

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