Fall 2002 -- Vol. 20, No. 1

FACES OF PENN STATE

Bruce G. Lindsay
Distinguished Professor of Statistics

Statistician Bruce Lindsay has worn several different hats in his 23 years at Penn State, including assistant, associate, and distinguished professor and department head.

Bruce Lindsay can relate to the John Mellencamp song “Small Town.” It could serve as his life’s theme song.

Lindsay grew up in The Dalles, Oregon, hard by the Columbia River, which runs along Oregon’s northern border with the state of Washington.

After staying on the West Coast to obtain his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees, and a stint in the Coast Guard, Lindsay headed east for his first job – at Penn State. And here he’s stayed.

“I’m from the West Coast, so some people find it a bit surprising,” he says. “There just aren’t the right universities or places for me there. I never felt like I had to move back there.”

And, much like The Dalles, State College offers a rural setting with ample outdoor options. Whether it’s Mount Hood in Oregon or Mount Nittany in Pennsylvania, Lindsay has always been minutes from a hike through picturesque scenery.

“From a lifestyle point of view, it’s a place where I can walk to work. I can go hiking or running in the mountains. I prefer this to living in a big city,” he says. “State College has provided a lot of what I liked about growing up in a small town.”

From a professional point of view, Penn State has provided a lot of what Lindsay likes in a work environment. A statistician who works in five areas—nuisance parameters, mixture models, minimum distance and robustness, computer algorithms, and applications in genomics—Lindsay has never been beset with the wanderlust that afflicts some academics.

He started as an assistant professor in 1979 and has been steadily promoted, achieving distinguished professor status in 1992. A two-year stint as department head completes a picture of Lindsay’s bottom-to-top life at Penn State.

“In many dimensions, it’s the right place for me. In the academic dimension, it’s treated me well and provided me with good support,” he says.

Lindsay’s long history at Penn State has enabled him to carve out his own niche, balanced between teaching, advising, and research.

“Training graduate students is really a combination of research and teaching. I also find it a nice change of pace to do classroom teaching,” he says. “It brings a continuity to the flow of my work. I don’t feel like there’s a break in the continuum at all.”

Understandably, Lindsay feels like he has achieved a personal and professional harmony. He lives in an ideal location and has forged such a strong international reputation he’s often invited abroad to speak.

“I can have the best of both environments this way. I can have quiet concentration here, then I can go out to the airport and I’m off to a new world where there’s adventure and excitement,” Lindsay says. “I would say very strongly this kind of career makes for a rich life, in an intellectual sense and in the sense of travel, and meeting smart people around the world, which I like very much.”

Andy Elder

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