Adrian Raftery
Blumstein-Jordan Professor of Statistics and Sociology,
and faculty affiliate of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, at the University of Washington.

AWARD CITATION: For outstanding contributions at the interface of the statistical sciences and the social, environmental and health sciences, as well as methodological research on Bayesian model selection and averaging.

RESPONSE FROM ADRIAN: I am deeply honored to receive the Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences. I'm disappointed not to be here in person, but I am enjoying my sabbatical in Prague!

Much of my research is indeed interdisciplinary, and it means a great deal to me to be recognized in this area by such distinguished colleagues. I am humbled and honored to follow in the footsteps of such giants of the field as the previous recipients Elizabeth Thompson, Max Morris, Ray Carroll, Doug Nychka and Jeff Wu. I would like to express my appreciation to the committee for their work: Jessica Utts (chair), Bill Eddy, Doug Kelly, Diane Lambert and Bill Smith.

It is wonderful to receive an award named for Jerry Sacks. Some of my interdisciplinary work has been on environmental statistics and has focused on the statistical analysis of deterministic models for environmental phenomena - whale population dynamics, environmental risk assessment, and weather. Jerry is one of the founders of this field, particularly through his landmark 1989 Statistical Science joint paper.

The future is bright for interdisciplinary research by statisticians. Although statistical analysis has been well developed for some areas such as biostatistics and bioinformatics, there are many other areas of science, social science, engineering, medicine and policy-making where the state of statistical analysis is rudimentary. There are many opportunities for statisticians to make path-breaking contributions to other fields in collaboration with substantive experts, and I would encourage all my colleagues to seek out such areas and get involved with them.

Thanks again to NISS and to the committee. I am deeply appreciative.

 

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