Jim Zidek has been elected to the Council of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) for a three year term: 2011 -2013.  The ISI has a long history going back to 1853, when Adolphe Quetelet convened in Brussels, the first of a series of International Statistical Congresses but without an organizational structure. The ISI was created following Quetelet's death in 1874 with the goal of organizing these conferences in a systematic fashion and today the Congresses, held ever two years, are one of the ISI's principal activities.
 
The ISI is governed by an Executive Committee and a Council to which Zidek has been elected. The Council meets once a year and its next meeting will be at the Dublin ISI Congress in Aug 2011. It has a number of sections including the Bernoulli Society and The International Environmetrics Society. Overall, it aspires to be the international face of statistical science and has various activities associated with that role.
 
  

  

Department of Statistics PhD candidate Luke Bornn has been honored by an invitation from the organizers of the MCMSki conference to be held in Park City Utah in January, to give an oral presentation in the Young Investigator Invited Session on Jan 6, 2011.  He was selected, from among those chosen to receive a travel fellowship to the conference, for his work on adaptive Monte Carlo methods. The meeting, the fourth such joint international meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) and ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis),  has the central theme of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and related methods including applications. These meetings  are meant to reflect work done during  the 21 years since the publication of Gelfand and Smith (1990, JASA), the paper that introduced these methods into the mainstream of statistical science.