Gertrude M. Cox Award Committee Seeks Nominees

The Gertrude M. Cox Award Committee is seeking nominees for the 2017 Gertrude M. Cox Award.

The award, established in 2003 through a joint agreement between the Washington Statistical Society (WSS) and RTI International, annually recognizes a statistician in early to mid-career (fewer than 15 years after terminal degree) who has made significant contributions to one or more of the areas of applied statistics in which Gertrude Cox worked: survey methodology, experimental design, biostatistics, and statistical computing.

The award is presented at the WSS Annual Dinner, usually held in June, with the recipient delivering a talk on a topic of general interest to the WSS membership before the dinner.

The honoree is chosen by a six-person committee—three each from WSS and RTI. This year’s committee consists of Mike Larsen (co-chair), Chris Moriarity, and Linda Young from WSS and Jill Dever, Phil Kott, and Karol Krotki (co-chair) from RTI.

Included in the award is a $1,000 honorarium, paid travel expenses to attend the WSS Annual Dinner, and a commemorative WSS plaque.

Past recipients include Sharon Lohr, Alan Zaslavsky, Tom Belin, Vance Berger, Francesca Domenici, Thomas Lumley, Jean Opsomer, Michael Elliott, Nilanjan Chatterjee, Amy Herring, Frauke Kreuter, Jerome Reiter, Jae Kwang Kim, and Bhramar Mukherjee.

Email nominations to Krotki by February 28 with a supporting statement and CV (or link). If you previously nominated a candidate and wish that nomination to be reconsidered, update the supporting materials.

The award is in memory of Gertrude M. Cox (1900–1978). In 1945, Cox became director of the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina. In the 1950s, as head of the department of experimental statistics at North Carolina State College, she played a key role in establishing mathematical statistics and biostatistics departments at the University of North Carolina. Upon her retirement from North Carolina State University in 1960, Cox became the first head of the statistical research division at the newly founded RTI. She was a founding member of the International Biometric Society (IBS) and, in 1949, became the first woman elected into the International Statistical Institute. She served as president of both the American Statistical Association (1956) and IBS (1968–1969). In 1975, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.