The Constance van Eeden Fund:
The Department is honoured to host Professor William Edward Strawderman as the first Statistician in Residence, as supported by the Constance van Eeden Fund for Honouring Distinguished Achievement in Statistical Science. Professor Strawderman's first talk is on September 14 at 4 pm, in the Department Workshop Seminar Series.
As stated in the guidelines of the fund,
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Bill more than meets the criteria in this description. He is a well-known statistical decision-theorist who has made fundamental contributions to his subject. His accomplishments have been recognized by his election to Fellowship in both the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) and to membership in the International Statistical Institute (ISI). He was elected Vice-President of the American Statistical Association in 1983 and its President in 1986. He served as a member of the Council of the IMS 1987-90. He was also elected to "Who's Who in the Frontiers of Science and Technology".
He lists more than 100 publications spanning a wide range of topics from theory to applications. On the applied side, titles of (joint) papers include:
- "Preschool Immunization Rates in the Practices of N.J. Pediatricians and Family Physicians;"
- "A Growth and Yield Model for Slash Pine;" and
- "Portfolio Selection Using Bayes Decision Rules and Hierarchical Models with Unknown Variance."
On the theoretical side, Bill is famous for his 1981 paper with George Casella on estimating a bounded normal mean. That paper spawned a renewed interest in inference for restricted parameter spaces. In the paper the authors show some remarkable and very unintuitive results about good estimators for the problem they address there. His 1994 paper with Peter Shao is another classic. There the authors derive an estimator that improves on the celebrated positive part James-Stein estimator. They thereby solve a very difficult problem that had remained open for more than 30 years.
Bill is currently a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics, Rutgers University, where he has been throughout most of his career. He served as its Chairman during the period 1977-83 and again in 1989-92. He travels and lectures extensively.
He will visit the Department during the period September 8-30, 1999 during which time he will give a short course on research topics of interest, kicking the series off with an introductory lecture at the Statistics Workshop on September 14. As well, he will interact with students as well as faculty and engage in collaborative research.
