The COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship (formerly known as R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship) is a very high recognition of achievement and scholarship in statistical science that recognizes the highly significant impact of statistical methods on scientific investigations. The award was established in 1963 by the North American

Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) comprises the presidents, past presidents and presidents-elect of the following, primarily Northern American, professional societies of statisticians: * American Statistical Association * ...

(COPSS) "to honor both the contributions of Sir

Ronald Aylmer Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who a ...

and the work of a present–day statistician for their advancement of statistical theory and applications." The COPSS Distinguished Lecture is given at the

Joint Statistical Meetings The Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) is a professional conference/academic conference for statisticians held annually every year since 1840 (usually in August). Billed as "the largest gathering of statisticians held in North America", JSM has attr ...

in North America and is subsequently published in a statistics

journal A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period *Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...

. The lecturer receives a plaque and a cash award of US$1000. It is given every year if a nominee considered eligible and worthy is found, which one was in all but five years up to 1984, and in all years since. In June 2020, the name of the award was changed to its current name after discussions concerning Fisher's controversial views on race and

eugenics Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior o ...

Past recipients of the award

*1964 Maurice Bartlett *1965

Oscar Kempthorne Oscar Kempthorne (January 31, 1919 – November 15, 2000) was a British statistician and geneticist known for his research on randomization-analysis and the design of experiments, which had wide influence on research in agriculture, genetics, ...

*1967 John Tukey *1968

Leo Goodman Leo Aria Goodman (August 7, 1928 – December 22, 2020) was an American statistician. He was known particularly for developing statistical methods for the social sciences, including statistical methods for analyzing categorical data and data from ...

*1970

Leonard Savage Leonard Jimmie Savage (born Leonard Ogashevitz; 20 November 1917 – 1 November 1971) was an American mathematician and statistician. Economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a g ...

*1971

Cuthbert Daniel Cuthbert Daniel (August 27, 1904 – August 8, 1997) was an American industrial statistician. Daniel was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of T ...

*1972 William G. Cochran *1973

Jerome Cornfield Jerome Cornfield (1912–1979) was an American statistician. He is best known for his work in biostatistics, but his early work was in economic statistics and he was also an early contributor to the theory of Bayesian inference. He played a role ...

*1974

George E. P. Box George Edward Pelham Box (18 October 1919 – 28 March 2013) was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. He has been called "one of the gre ...

*1975

Herman Chernoff Herman Chernoff (born July 1, 1923) is an American applied mathematician, statistician and physicist. He was formerly a professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford, and MIT, currently emeritus at Harvard University. Early l ...

*1976

George Alfred Barnard George Alfred Barnard (23 September 1915 – 9 August 2002) was a British statistician known particularly for his work on the foundations of statistics and on quality control. Biography George Barnard was born in Walthamstow, Lon ...

*1977 R. C. Bose *1978

William Kruskal William Henry Kruskal (; October 10, 1919 – April 21, 2005) was an American mathematician and statistician. He is best known for having formulated the Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance (together with W. Allen Wallis), a widely used ...

*1979

C. R. Rao Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao FRS (born 10 September 1920), commonly known as C. R. Rao, is an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He is currently professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the Un ...

*1982 F. J. Anscombe *1983 I. R. Savage *1985 Theodore W. Anderson *1986 David H. Blackwell *1987

Frederick Mosteller Charles Frederick Mosteller (December 24, 1916 – July 23, 2006) was an American mathematician, considered one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department from 19 ...

*1988

Erich Leo Lehmann Erich Leo Lehmann (20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009) was a German-born American statistician, who made a major contribution to nonparametric hypothesis testing. He is one of the eponyms of the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and of the Hodges� ...

*1989

David R. Cox Sir David Roxbee Cox (15 July 1924 – 18 January 2022) was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of statistics included introducing logistic regression, the proportional hazards model and the Cox pro ...

*1990 Donald A. S. Fraser *1991

David Brillinger David Ross Brillinger (born 1937) is a statistician and Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1961 under John Tukey. Brillinger's former doctoral students include Peter G ...

*1992 Paul Meier *1993

Herbert Robbins Herbert Ellis Robbins (January 12, 1915 – February 12, 2001) was an American mathematician and statistician. He did research in topology, measure theory, statistics, and a variety of other fields. He was the co-author, with Richard Co ...

*1994

Elizabeth A. Thompson Elizabeth Alison Thompson (born May 22, 1949) is a British-born American statistician at the University of Washington. Her research concerns the use of genetic data to infer relationships between individuals and populations. She is the 2017– ...

*1995

Norman Breslow Norman Edward Breslow (February 21, 1941 – December 9, 2015) was an American statistician and medical researcher. At the time of his death, he was Professor (Emeritus) of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, of the University of Wash ...

*1996

Bradley Efron Bradley Efron (; born May 24, 1938) is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association (2004) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1987–1988).Cochran, J. (1 September 2015), "ASA Lead ...

*1997

Colin Mallows Colin Lingwood Mallows (born 10 September 1930, Great Sampford, Essex) is an English statistician, who has worked in the United States since 1960. He is known for Mallows's ''Cp'', a regression model diagnostic procedure, widely used in regressio ...

*1998 Arthur P. Dempster *1999 Jack Kalbfleisch *2000

Ingram Olkin Ingram Olkin (July 23, 1924 – April 28, 2016) was a professor emeritus and chair of statistics and education at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is known for developing statistical analysis for evalua ...

*2001 James O. Berger *2002 Raymond Carroll *2003 Adrian F. M. Smith *2004

Donald Rubin Donald is a masculine given name derived from the Gaelic name ''Dòmhnall''.. This comes from the Proto-Celtic *''Dumno-ualos'' ("world-ruler" or "world-wielder"). The final -''d'' in ''Donald'' is partly derived from a misinterpretation of the ...

*2005 R. Dennis Cook *2006 Terence Speed *2007

Marvin Zelen Marvin Zelen (June 21, 1927 – November 15, 2014) was Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science ...

*2008 Ross L. Prentice *2009

Noel Cressie Noel Andrew Cressie is an Australian and American statistician. He is Distinguished Professor and DirectorCentre for Environmental Informatics at the University of Wollongong in Wollongong (53 miles south of Sydney), Australia. Education ...

*2010 Bruce G. Lindsay *2011 C.F. Jeff Wu *2012 Roderick Little *2013 Peter J. Bickel *2014

Grace Wahba Grace Goldsmith Wahba (born August 3, 1934) is an American statistician and now-retired I. J. Schoenberg-Hilldale Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a pioneer in methods for smoothing noisy data. Best known f ...

*2015 Stephen Fienberg *2016 Alice S. Whittemore *2017 Robert E. Kass *2018

Susan Murphy Susan Allbritton Murphy (born April 16, 1958) is an American statistician, known for her work applying statistical methods to clinical trials of treatments for chronic and relapsing medical conditions. She is a professor at Harvard University, ...

*2019 Paul R. Rosenbaum *2020

Kathryn Roeder Kathryn M. Roeder is an American statistician known for her development of statistical methods to uncover the genetic basis of complex disease and her contributions to mixture models, semiparametric inference, and multiple testing. Roeder holds po ...

*2021

Wing Hung Wong Wing Hung Wong () is a Chinese-American statistician, computational biologist, and Stanford University professor. Biography Wong graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 with a bachelor's degree. At the University of Wisco ...

Renaming of the lectureship

On June 4, 2020, following national movements to fight systemic racism and police brutality in response to the

murder of George Floyd On , George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was murdered in the U.S. city of Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer. Floyd had been arrested on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin knelt on Floyd's ...

, one of the Lectureship award committee members, Daniela Witten ( UW), started a discussion on renaming the Fisher Lectureship on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

R.A. Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who ...

was a

eugenicist Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or ...

. A petition to "Rename The Fisher Lecture After

David Blackwell David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of th ...

" was initiated by Miles Ott (

Smith Smith may refer to: People * Metalsmith, or simply smith, a craftsman fashioning tools or works of art out of various metals * Smith (given name) * Smith (surname), a family name originating in England, Scotland and Ireland ** List of people wi ...

) on

Change.org Change.org is a worldwide nonprofit petition website, based in California, US, operated by the San Francisco-based company of the same name, which has over 400 million users and offers the public the ability to promote the petitions they care abo ...

. The COPSS leadership responded by soliciting input via an online form on the official website. Harry Crane (

Rutgers Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and w ...

), Joseph Guinness (

Cornell Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach a ...

) and Ryan Martin (

NCSU North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The university ...

) posted a comment arguing against the renaming on June 13, 2020. They argued that the lectureship was established to honor Fisher's scientific achievement, not the scientist. They proposed to amend the description of the lectureship instead of renaming it. On June 15 the Executive Director of

ASA ASA as an abbreviation or initialism may refer to: Biology and medicine * Accessible surface area of a biomolecule, accessible to a solvent * Acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin * Advanced surface ablation, refractive eye surgery * Anterior spinal ar ...

, Ron Wasserstein, notified its members that the leadership has recommended changing the lectureship name to COPSS. The process that led to the decision was unclear. Ron commented on Twitter, "There is no principle of greater value than the principle of strengthening the statistical community by moving forward to form a more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive society". On June 23, the name R.A. Fisher Award and Lectureship was officially retired and the announced recipient of the award for 2020, Kathryn Roeder, was to receive the award under the new name. The chair of COPSS, Bhramar Mukherjee, also made the announcement on Twitter. In their statement, the COPSS mentioned that they retired the previous name of the award "to advance a more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive statistical community."

Other lecture series named after R. A. Fisher

Two other series of lectures are also named after R. A. Fisher: *The Fisher Memorial Lecture on an application of mathematics to biology, usually given in the UK, first given in 1964 * The Sir Ronald Fisher Lecture on

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes ( natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life ...

or statistics, given at the

University of Adelaide The University of Adelaide (informally Adelaide University) is a public research university located in Adelaide, South Australia. Established in 1874, it is the third-oldest university in Australia. The university's main campus is located on N ...

, Australia, first given in 1990

References

External links

Official website
Statistical awards American awards Awards established in 1963

Past recipients of the award

Renaming of the lectureship

Other lecture series named after R. A. Fisher

See also

References

External links