ROBERT TIBSHIRANI, a professor of statistics and of health research and policy at Stanford, has been named the winner of the Statistical Society of Canada’s highest honor – the SSC Gold Medal. The award, which recognizes the contributions of Canadian statisticians, noted the researcher’s “broad and important contributions to genetics, medicine, public health, traffic safety and other scientific areas.”
A world-renowned innovator in the field of statistics, Tibshirani is particularly well known for his contributions to machine learning and the analysis of biological and health data. His many advances include the “lasso” method and generalized additive modeling, both of which are now standard approaches in data fitting, and significance analysis of microarrays, used by biologists to evaluate changes in gene expression levels.
Tibshirani currently conducts research on high-dimensional data, an area with special relevance to the data-swamped field of computational biology, and develops genomics and proteomics software packages.
The citation also recognized the researcher’s educational contributions. His textbooks, which include Generalized Additive Models, An Introduction to the Bootstrap and The Elements of Statistical Learning, are considered standard introductions to the field.
Tibshirani will deliver the Gold Medal Address at the society’s 2013 annual meeting.
— BY MAX MCCLURE
