1998 PARZEN PRIZE FOR STATISTICAL INNOVATION

The 1998 EMANUEL AND CAROL PARZEN PRIZE FOR STATISTICAL INNOVATION was awarded on Wednesday, May 13, 1998 to Bradley Efron (Professor of Statistics and Max H. Stein Professor of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University) for outstanding and influential innovations and breakthroughs in theoretical research in mathematical statistics, and effective applications of theoretical research. Professor Efron has made many pioneering fundamental contributions to bootstrap and computer intensive statistical methods, empirical Bayes methods, survival analysis, clinical trials, differential geometry, likelihood theory, and survey sampling.

Professor Efron presented a popular lecture (on his seminal research on analysis of truncated data) entitled

Bradley Efron is an influential statistician and biostatistician, educator, mentor, and collaborator in research with many scientists. He has had many outstanding Ph.D. students. He serves the national and international statistical communities with distinction and dedication. Bradley Efron was born in 1938 and received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford in 1964. He has been a faculty member in Statistics and Biostatistics at Stanford since 1966.

Among the many, many honors that Professor Efron has received is election to Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1986), Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983), and MacArthur Prize Fellow (1983). The S. S. Wilks Medal, the most prestigious prize of the American Statistical Association, was awarded to Professor Efron in 1990. Professor Efron is co-author of An Introduction to the Bootstrap (1993). His published articles number more than 95.

To promote the dissemination of statistical achievements, the Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation is awarded (around April of even numbered years) to North American statisticians who have made outstanding and influential contributions to the development of applicable and innovative statistical methods. The Parzen Prize is awarded by the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University to a nominee selected by the members of the Parzen Prize Committee who for 1998 were: David Brillinger, Herman Chernoff, Joe Newton, Grace Wahba, and Marvin Zelen.

Nominations for the year 2000 Parzen Prize should be submitted (by October 1, 1999) to Professor H. J. Newton, Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3143.

The 1994 Parzen Prize Winner was Grace Wahba, Bascom Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin; her Parzen Prize lecture was ``Statistical Models, Reproducing Kernels, Machine Learning, Multivariate Function Estimation, Cross Validation and all that ...''. The 1996 Parzen Prize winner was Donald B. Rubin, Professor of Statistics at Harvard University; his lecture was entitled ``Merging Statistical and Econometric Approaches to Causal Inference in Nonrandomized Studies.''

Emanuel Parzen is Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Texas A&M University. In 1994 he was awarded the Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Medal of the American Statistical Association ``for outstanding research in Time Series Analysis, especially for his innovative introduction of reproducing kernel spaces, spectral analysis and spectrum smoothing; for pioneering contributions in quantile and density quantile functions and estimation; for unusually successful and influential textbooks in Probability and Stochastic Processes; for excellent and enthusiastic teaching and dissemination of statistical knowledge; and for a commitment to service on Society Councils, Government Advisory Committees, and Editorial Boards.''

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