June Gloria Morita is an American

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

and statistics educator. She is a principal lecturer emerita in statistics at the University of Washington, and is known for her innovative lessons in statistics based on examples from real life. For instance, one of her classes tested whether helium-filled

footballs A football is a ball inflated with air that is used to play one of the various sports known as football. In these games, with some exceptions, goals or points are scored only when the ball enters one of two designated goal-scoring areas; football ...

travel farther than air-filled footballs, with the assistance of her son, Washington Huskies football place-kicker Eric Guttorp. Another lesson, for local elementary school students, tested the mark and recapture method by catching fish at the school's fish pond. Morita did her undergraduate and graduate education at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated in 1976 with a double major in mathematics and anthropology, earned a master's degree in 1978, and completed her Ph.D. in 1984. Her dissertation, supervised by Kjell Doksum, was ''Nonparametric Methods for Matched Observations from Life Distributions''. Morita is married to Swedish statistician

Peter Guttorp Peter Guttorp is a statistician, born in Sweden, with most of his career in the United States. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and professor at the Norwegian Computing Center. Most of his work is in stochastic modeling ...

, who was also educated at Berkeley, and the two statisticians were the first new hires when the University of Washington first formed its statistics department in 1980. Morita won Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999. In 2006, five years after her husband, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. She is also an elected member of the

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. It was founded in 1885, although there had been international statistical congresses since 1853. The institute has about 4,000 elected members from gov ...

. In 2009, the American Statistical Association gave Morita their Founders Award "for outstanding leadership; for energetic service to the association as chapter president, regional vice chair, and chair of the Council of Chapters and a member of the Council of Sections Governing Board, the Board of Directors, and numerous committees; for initiating, promoting, and sustaining effective programs to enhance quantitative and statistical literacy in schools nationally and internationally, including ''Making Sense of Statistical Studies'' and programs to prepare undergraduates as mathematics/statistics tutors in middle schools; and for setting a standard of fun and excitement to the Council of Chapters activities at association meetings."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morita, June Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American statisticians Women statisticians Statistics educators University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Washington faculty Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute Fellows of the American Statistical Association