2005 Rao Prize Awarded to Jayaram Sethuraman

10 November 2005—Jayaram Sethuraman, the former Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor and current professor emeritus and adjunct professor at Florida State University, has been honored with the 2005 C.R. & Bhargavi Rao Prize at Penn State University. This award, the second in a series to be awarded every two years, was established by C.R. and Bhargavi Rao as a means to honor and recognize outstanding and influential innovations in the theory and practice of mathematical statistics, international leadership in directing statistics research, and pioneering contributions by a recognized leader in the field of statistics.

The award, consisting of an engraved plaque and cash prize, was presented to Sethuraman by Daniel J. Larson, dean of the Penn State Eberly College of Science, as part of Statistics Day, a one-day workshop, organized by Penn State's Department of Statistics and Center for Multivariate Analysis, which took place on Penn State's University Park campus.

Sethuraman is known as a pioneer in the theoretical study of large and moderate deviations. He also is recognized for his contributions to order statistics, Bahadur and Pitman efficiency, stochastic majorization, Dirichlet processes and Bayesian nonparametrics, sequential analysis, reliability theory, survival analysis, image analysis, and Bayesian analysis. More recently, he has been the leader in the use of counting processes and martingale theory to study repair models and develop nonparametric inferential procedures for these models.

Sethuraman is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a recipient of the U.S. Army's S.S. Wilks Award. In 1993, he received Florida State University's Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor the faculty can bestow on a colleague.

[ J R / L R / B K K ]