Lindsay Named Head of Department of Statistics

21 August 2006—Bruce G. Lindsay, the Willaman Professor of Statistics and director of the Center for Likelihood Studies in the Eberly College of Science, has been appointed as head of the Department of Statistics. He succeeds James Rosenberger, who has served as head of the department since 1991.

"Dr. Lindsay has been an academic leader in the department for many years, as well as twice providing leadership as its interim or acting head," comments Daniel J. Larson, the Verne M. Willaman Dean of the Eberly College of Science. "I am delighted that the statistics faculty and the college now will have the benefit of his strong leadership as the head of the Department of Statistics."

Lindsay's statistical research includes the area of 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 complicated by the presence of many "nuisance parameters," which are needed for accurate modeling but which are not themselves of scientific interest. Lindsay has made several fundamental contributions to addressing major deficiencies that arise when applying standard statistical analyses under these conditions. Lindsay also is recognized for methods he developed for working with mixture models, which are used when data are collected from a mixture of populations. His work in this area is recognized as a major contribution to the foundations of statistical theory.

In conjunction with his work in statistical theory, Lindsay develops statistical methods that are useful for research in other scientific disciplines. In recent years, he has constructed models and analyses that have been applied to biological data from genomic studies. An additional portion of his research is concerned with developing the computer algorithms needed to make statistical inferences from complex probability models.

Lindsay previously has served the Department of Statistics as interim department head in 1996 and as acting department head from 1998 to 2000. 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. He 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 and Willaman Professor of Statistics in 2004.

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