Each fall the Department awards two prizes.
- The Z.W. Birnbaum award, instituted in 1986 in honor of our distinguished emeritus professor, recognizes the graduate student who gives the outstanding general exam during the past year.
- The Dororthy M. Gilford teaching award, instituted in 1992, recognizes outstanding performance by a graduate teaching assistant during the past year.
Past recipients are:
| Year | Z.W. Birnbaum Recipient(s) | Teaching Award Recipient(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 2007-2008 | Roopesh Ranjan & Yanming Di | Ryan Admiraal & Mark Wheldon |
| 2006-2007 | Larissa Stanberry | Assaf Oron |
| 2005-2006 | Veronica Berrocal | Linqiu Wu |
| 2004-2005 | Qunhua Li & Debashis Mondal | Caroline Cutting & Albert Kim |
| 2003-2004 | Raphael Gottardo & Marloes Maathuis | Amanda Cox & Krista Gile & J. McLean Sloughter |
| 2002-2003 | Fadoua Balabdaoui & Mathias Drton | Veronica Berrocal |
| 2001-2002 | Amy Anderson & Solly Sieberts | Rebecca Nugent |
| 2000-2001 | Shuguang Song | Dana Coe & Kevin Connely |
| 1999-2000 | Daniela Golinelli | Amy Anderson & Anton Westveld |
| 1998-1999 | Greg Ridgeway | Erin Sullivan |
| 1997-1998 | Nilanjan Chatterjee | Tracy Glass |
| 1996-1997 | Ying Zhang & Sylvain Sardy | |
| 1995-1996 | Chris Volinsky | Ingo Ruczinski |
| 1994-1995 | Dean Billheimer | Simon Byers |
| 1993-1994 | Wendy Meiring | Craig Aumann |
| 1992-1993 | Geof Givens | Chris Volinsky |
| 1991-1992 | Shili Lin | Paul Nakayu |
| 1990-1992 | Jens Praestgaard | |
| 1989-1990 | James Hughes | |
| 1988-1989 | Michael Newton | |
| 1986-1987 | Charlie Geyer | |
| 1985-1986 | John Michalak |
Faculty Awards:
Vladimir Minin won the 2007 Leonard J. Savage Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Applied Bayesian Methodology. The award is given by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).
Elizabeth Thompson - elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This is one of the highest honors that
a scientist can receive and recognizes those who have made distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Elizabeth Thompson - awarded an MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) from NIH. Merit awards provide long-term support to investigators with impressive records of scientific achievement in research areas of special importance or promise.
Peter Guttorp - received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Statistical
Association's Section on Statistics and the Environment. The award is in recognition of his innovative work on statistical methodology in environmental research, leadership in the development of environmetrics, and service to the profession.
Adrian Raftery - named IMS Fellow. He received the award for seminal contributions to Bayesian model selection and computation, demography, clustering and stochastic modeling, for influential and novel high-impact statistical applications, and for conscientious professional service.
Student Awards:
Jeff Eaton (undergraduate alumni) has been awarded the Dean's Medal for 2008 by the College of Arts and Sciences.
Donatello Telesca and Anton Westveld have won the ASA Section of Bayesian Statistical Science (SBSS) student paper competition.
Alex Lenkoski's poster "The mode oriented stochastic search for nondecomposable graphical models"
won a "Best Poster" award at the Workshop in High Dimensional Bayesian Inference athe the University of Warwick on April 14th-16th, 2008.
Qunhua Li received a travel award to present a paper at the 2008 Bernoulli World Congress/IMS Annual Meeting in Singapore this summer.
Alumni Awards:
Nilanjan Chatterjee was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Society.