Dr. Stephen E. Fienberg received the 2015 Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research. The announcement was made by Nell Sedransk, Director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS), during a reception at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Seattle, Washington. Sedransk said Fienberg is receiving this award, “For a remarkable career devoted to the development and application of statistical methodology to solve problems for the benefit of society, including aspects of human rights, privacy and confidentiality, forensics, survey and census-taking, and more; and for exceptional leadership in a variety of professional and governmental organizations, including in the founding of NISS.”
Fienberg is Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, and Cylab, and co-Director of the Living Analytics Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He has authored more than 20 books and 500 papers and related publications. Fienberg’s interest in confidentiality and disclosure limitation ties both to surveys and censuses and also to categorical data analysis. It also led him to work on a multiple year project with NISS entitled “NISS Digital Government Project.”
Fienberg is originally from Toronto, Canada. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics from the University of Toronto, then earned his master’s degree and his doctorate in statistics from Harvard University. He joined the CMU faculty in 1980.Amongst his many accolades, he has served as the co-Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Report Review Committee from 2008-2016. He is the co-Founder of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Annals of Applied Statistics and Founding Editor of the Annual Review of Statistics and its Application. He is a fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis and was President from 1996-1997; a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and President from 1998-1999; and he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The Jerome Sacks Award for Cross Disciplinary Research was created in 2001 in honor of Jerome (Jerry) Sacks, the founding director of NISS.As Sacks award recipient, Fienberg receives $1,000, and his name is added to a plaque at NISS that lists all recipients of the award.
Past winners of the Sacks Award include: Terry Speed (2014), Kenneth Burnham (2013), William Meeker (2012), Emory Brown (2011), Sallie Keller (2010), Ramanathan Gnanadesikan (2009), John Rice (2008), Cliff Spiegelman (2007), Adrian Raftery (2006), Jeff Wu (2005), Douglas Nychka (2004), Raymond Carroll (2003),Max Morris (2002), and Elizabeth Thompson (2001).