Distinguished Achievement Award

The SDNS awarded the 2023 Distinguished Achievement Award to Eric Chicken of Florida State University.  Dr. Chicken has invented and applied many new and improved methods in the fields of function estimation and statistical process control via wavelets, and his work is broadly interdisciplinary, with applications and collaborations in engineering, medicine, hydrology, education, and operations research.  Dr. Chicken was critical member of the Science of Test Research Consortium, a group of academic researchers sponsored by Office of Secretary of Defense Director, Operational Test & Evaluation and the DoD Test Resource Management Center.  He applied statistical rigor to test and evaluation through advancing dynamic model validation metrics, wavelet-based statistical process monitoring, and nonparametric distribution-free changepoint estimation.  He has shared his vast technical contributions, especially in the field of statistical process control, through an extensive number of publications that have heavily influenced the engineering and defense community.  In addition to his definitive technical accomplishments in statistical process monitoring, Eric has taken on several leadership and service roles across the university and within ASA, serving as faculty senator, Graduate Director, Chapter Chair, and conference chair and organizer. Eric is a dedicated mentor and educator, committed to nurturing the next generation of statisticians and scientists at FSU, Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), and throughout the national defense community.

The SDNS awarded the 2023 Distinguished Achievement Award to Michael Hamada of Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).  Dr. Hamada has invented and applied many new and improved reliability methods and metrics, including principled integration of all available data sources and information, to facilitate modern assessments of reliability for the U.S. nuclear stockpile and track the health of the weapon surveillance program.  He has shared his impactful technical contributions, covering an array of statistical methods, in the service of national security through a prolific number of publications that have heavily influenced the statistics and engineering international community. In addition to his authoritative technical accomplishments in reliability and experimental design, Michael has played a significant role in mentoring the next generation of statisticians and scientists at LANL and throughout the national defense community.

The SDNS awarded the 2021 Distinguished Achievement Award to Scott Vander Wiel of Los Alamos National Laboratories. Dr. Vander Wiel has developed novel statistical frameworks and methodologies for physics modeling uncertainty for the U.S. nuclear stockpile, nuclear forensics, nuclear data, reliability and rare events for defense applications, and materials characterization for defense applications. As a statistician, he has exemplified LANL’s mission to solve national security challenges through scientific excellence by collaborating with multidisciplinary teams and developing novel methodology to meet important milestones in multiple national security areas. In addition to the outstanding technical accomplishments across a wide problem space, he has played a large role in mentoring statisticians and scientists at LANL.

The SDNS awarded the 2021 Distinguished Achievement Award to Janet Myhre (Mathematical Analysis Research Cooperation Professor Emeritus Claremont McKenna College). Dr. Myhre has supported the Navy’s strategic deterrent as the statistical advisor to Navy Strategic Systems Programs leadership for over 50 years. This required her to independently review reliability and safety analyses provided by government and contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and offer modifications to their proposals or new approaches. She founded the Reed Institute for Decision Science at Claremont McKenna and that gave an opportunity for students to work on real life defense related statistical problems. Through her efforts, there have been many former students placed in defense related statistical positions, which has expanded the use of statistics in the community.

The SDNS awarded the 2019 Distinguished Achievement Award to David Scott for decades of collaboration with defense and security agencies, especially the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Security Agency. These partnerships have led to technically impressive contributions to multivariate analysis, outlier detection, and nonparametric density estimation and data visualization.

​ The 2018 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) is Alyson Wilson. The awards committee recognized Alyson for her key roles at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Institute of Defense Analyses, both vital components of our national defense program, as well as her accomplishments and leadership as the academic director of the Laboratory for Analytical Sciences, a partnership between the National Security Agency and a variety of academic institutions, chiefly North Carolina State University. In addition, the award acknowledges Alyson's service to SDNS in numerous roles, including most notably as its chair in 2007, and her research in Bayesian reliability that was largely motivated by important defense applications.  As one nominator said, "in terms of her career, her research, her service, and her leadership, I know of no one better qualified to receive this recognition."

Dr. Alyson Wilson is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences at North Carolina State University. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research interests include statistical reliability, Bayesian methods, and the application of statistics to problems in defense and national security. She is the coordinator of NCSU's Data-Driven Science cluster, which focuses on the development of interdisciplinary collaborations between statistics, mathematics, and computer science to develop leadership in data science.

Prior to joining NCSU, Dr. Wilson was a Research Staff Member at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington, DC (2011-2013), where she helped provide research support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Before her move to Washington, Dr. Wilson was an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University (2008-2011). From 1999-2008, she was a Project Leader and Technical Lead for Department of Defense Programs in the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In this role, she developed and led a portfolio of work in the application of statistics to the reliability of conventional and nuclear weapons. Dr. Wilson continues her collaboration with Los Alamos as a Guest Scientist..

Prior to her move to Los Alamos, Dr. Wilson was a senior statistician and operations research analyst with Cowboy Programming Resources (1995-1999), where she planned, executed, and analyzed U. S. Army air defense artillery operational evaluations. From 1990-1991, she was a mathematical statistician at the National Institutes of Health.

Wilson has served on numerous national panels, including the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Integrating Humans, Machines, and Networks (2012-2014), the NAS Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Validation, Verification, and Uncertainty Quantification (2010-2011), the NAS Committees (Phase 1-3) to Review the Testing of Body Armor Materials by the U.S. Army (2009-2011), the NAS Oversight Committee for the Workshop on Industrial Methods for the Effective Test and Development of Defense Systems (2008-2009), the NAS Panel on Methodological Improvement to the Department of Homeland Security's Biological Agent Risk Analysis (2006-2008), and the NAS Panel on the Operational Test Design and Evaluation of the Interim Armored Vehicle (2002-2003). She is a member of the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE/OS) Applied Mathematics Program Committee of Visitors (2013) and the Sandia National Laboratories Predictive Engineering Science Panel (2008-present).

Dr. Wilson is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and a member of the NCSU Research Leadership Academy. She is the former Reviews Editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the American Statistician and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Uncertainty Quantification. She is the winner of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security Distinguished Achievement Award (2018), NCSU Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award (2017), the Army Wilks Award (2015), the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Director's Distinguished Performance Award (2008), the LANL Star Award (2008), the DOE Defense Programs Award of Excellence (2007), and the LANL Achievement Award (2000, 2005). She is a founder and past-chair of the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security.

In addition to numerous publications, Dr. Wilson has co-authored a book, Bayesian Reliability, and has co-edited two other books, Statistical Methods in Counterterrorism: Game Theory, Modeling, Syndromic Surveillance, and Biometric Authentication and Modern Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Reliability. She holds a patent for her early work in medical imaging. Dr. Wilson received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Duke University, her M.S. in Statistics from Carnegie-Mellon University, and her B.A. in Mathematical Sciences from Rice University.

The 2017 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) is Michael Gilmore. The awards committee recognized Gilmore for the fundamental changes he made as Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) in how the Department of Defense (DoD) designs and analyzes data from operational tests, including his strong advocacy of statistically rigorous test methods to both improve the information gained from testing and to provide clear justification of the required resources.

Ron Fricker, chair of the awards committee and head of the Virginia Tech Department of Statistics said of Dr. Gilmore, “I cannot think of anyone more deserving of the award. I had the privilege of serving on a number of National Academies panels sponsored by DOT&E that were focused on improving how DoD does test and evaluation, including how it employs statistical methods to rigorously design and analyze the tests. In so doing, I was able to personally observe Dr. Gilmore’s strong and unwavering commitment to do the right thing, both in terms of testing and in support of our men and women in uniform.”

The office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation was created in 1983 by Congress. The director does not make acquisition decisions but instead informs those who make such decisions about system performance under realistic operating conditions. A presidential appointee who is confirmed by the Senate, the director monitors all operational testing in the Department of Defense and by law reports independently to Congress. In 2016, DOT&E monitored over 300 DoD acquisition programs. The DoD’s total planned investment in the largest 79 of these programs is $1.44 trillion. The cost and complexity associated with these programs makes rigorous testing a critical part of the acquisition system.

The chair of the ASA’s Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security, Laura Freeman, said, “As the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, Dr. Gilmore was an extraordinary advocate for using statistical methods in the testing of defense systems.” She went on to say that “He single handedly changed the fundamental methodologies used across all of the Services and Components. It is worth noting that in 1998 the National Research Council recommended using many of these methods to improve operational testing, but it took Dr. Gilmore’s leadership and vision to make it a reality.”

Gilmore was sworn in as the 6^th Director of Operational Test and Evaluation on September 23, 2009 where the then served in that role under four Secretaries of Defense through both terms of the Obama administration. He is a former Deputy Director of General Purpose Programs within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and, prior to becoming the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, he served as the Assistant Director for National Security at the Congressional Budget Office.  Gilmore holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT and master’s and doctoral degrees in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The 2016 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) is Edward J. Wegman.  Edward is Full Professor in the College of Science Department of Computational and Data Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.  Professor Wegman received the BS degree in mathematics from St. Louis University in 1965, the MS degree in mathematical statistics from the University of Iowa in 1967, and the PhD degree in mathematical statistics from the University of Iowa in 1968. From 1968 to 1978, Edward was a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of North Carolina.  From 1978 to 1986, Edward was the director of the Statistics and Probability Program at the Office of Naval Research for four years followed by another four years as the head of the Mathematical Sciences Division.  During this time, he fostered foundational and innovative research projects in statistics and computing to address important problems in defense. I would like to highlight a very important research idea that was supported by Ed – CART or Classification and Regression Trees. The seminal book by Breiman, et al. specifically acknowledges the support of the ONR contract and “our warm relations with Edward Wegman.” 

Since 1986 he has served as a Professor and the Director of the Center for Computational Statistics (now Center for Computational Data Sciences) at George Mason University.  It is noteworthy that he was the founding Chairman of the Department of Applied and Engineering Statistics at George Mason University.  His research areas include the analysis of high frequency sonar data, ultra-high speed computing, remote sensing, signal and image processing, and automated serendipity for total information awareness.  Ed Wegman also provided extensive opportunities for those interested in research for the Department of Defense through his positions on the Executive Board of the Army Conference on Applied Statistics (now called the Conference of Applied Statistics in Defense, co-sponsored by SDNS) and the Interface Foundation. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an Elected Member of the Royal Statistical Society, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Ed has received several awards for his work in defense and national security, such as the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Medal, the Navy Special Achievement Award, the Army Wilks Medal for Distinguished Research Contributions, and many others.

The SDNS Distinguished Achievement Award was presented to Professor Wegman at the 2016 Chicago JSM during the Section business meeting and mixer.  The quality, depth and significance of Dr. Wegman’s work is clearly reflected and demonstrated in his more than 200 refereed journal papers, several patents, and numerous research grants.  Dr. Edward Wegman’s important contributions to defense and national security will live on for many years to come through his tireless efforts to ensure defense and national security researchers the opportunity to disseminate important research.  Ed has produced over forty PhDs. At least eight of these were from the Department of Defense, and many of the dissertations of all his students focused on defense and national security problems.

The 2010 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) is Carey E. Priebe. Carey is Full Professor in the Whiting School of Engineering Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. Professor Priebe received the BS degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1984, the MS degree in computer science from San Diego State University in 1988, and the PhD degree in information technology (computational statistics) from George Mason University in 1993. From 1985 to 1994, he was a mathematician and scientist in the US Navy research and development laboratory system. Since 1994 he has been a professor at The Johns Hopkins University in the department and school where he is now. It is noteworthy that he holds joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Center for Imaging Science, the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, and the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute. He is a past President of the Interface Foundation of North America - Computing Science & Statistics, a past Chair of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistical Computing, a past Vice President of the International Association for Statistical Computing, and he is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, and Computational Statistics. His research interests include computational statistics, kernel and mixture estimates, statistical pattern recognition, statistical image analysis, dimensionality reduction, model selection, and statistical inference for high-dimensional and graph data. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Lifetime Member of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Professor Priebe is a Research Professor in the National Security Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School, and, in 2008, was named one of six inaugural National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows to conduct research on fusion and interference from multiple and disparate data sources.

The SDNS Distinguished Achievement Award was presented to Professor Priebe at the 2010 Vancouver JSM during the Section business meeting and mixer. The following is the unabbreviated award citation:

The quality, depth and significance of Priebe’s work is clearly reflected and demonstrated in his more than 8o refereed journal papers, numerous patents, 30+ research grants and the professional placement of students who have received and, thereby, benefited from his mentoring.

The Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security is proud to announce that this year’s Distinguished Achievement Award was given to John E. Rolph,

While over the course of his career Rolph has served the statistical profession in many and varied ways, the committee found his contributions to improving the practice of statistics within the defense and national security communities particularly noteworthy.  For example, Rolph chaired the Committee on Assessing the Feasibility, Accuracy, and the Technical Capability of a National Ballistics Database, the Panel on Statistical Methods for Testing and Evaluating Defense Systems, and the CNSTAT Workshop on Statistical Issues in Defense Analysis and Testing; he also served on the CNSTAT Panel on the Operational Test Design and Evaluation of the Interim Armored Vehicle and on the Oversight Committee for the Workshop on Statistical Methods in Software Engineering for Defense Systems; in addition, he is currently serving as a member of the Oversight Committee for the Workshop on Industrial Methods for the Effective Test and Development of Defense Systems, all for the National Research Council.

Rolph earned an A.B. in statistics in 1962 and Ph.D. in statistics in 1966, both from the University of California, Berkley.  After a short period in academia, he joined the RAND Corporation as a research statistician in 1969.  At RAND Rolph held increasingly senior positions, including Head of the Statistical Research and Consulting Group, Associate Head of Economics and Statistics Department, and Associate Corporate Research Manager, Social Policy.  In 1995 he left RAND to become chairman of the Information & Operations Management Department at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, a position he held until 2000.  In addition to his position as Professor of Statistics at the Marshall School of Business, Rolph also holds faculty appointments in the USC Law School and Mathematics Department.

Professor Rolph has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on the application of statistical methods to fields as diverse as national defense, health policy and law. Among his professional activities, he  served as Chair, Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT), National Academy of Sciences (1998-2004); as editor of CHANCE (1992-1995); and as associate editor for the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics (1981-1991) and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (1972-1977).

The 2009 awards committee consisted of Max Morris (chair), Pat Jacobs and Myron Katzoff.  In February 2010 the awards committee will be soliciting nominations for next year’s award.  In addition to new nominations, the committee strongly encourages nominators whose nominations were not selected this year to resubmit them as nominations are not automatically carried forward.  For more information, contact Myron Katzoff, chair of the 2010 awards committee at mjk5@cdc.gov.

The Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security is proud to announce that the 2008 Distinguished Achievement Award was given to Dr. Paul Ellner, U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA). Dr. Ellner was nominated by Dr. David E. Mortin also of AMSAA.

Dr. Ellner received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He joined AMSAA in 1979 and, within his first year, he became the coordinator of the Department of Energy (DOE) - Army methodology working group on nuclear weapons statistics reliability assessment.  The methodology that Dr. Ellner co-developed has been successfully applied to the assessments of multiple DOE-Army nuclear warhead sections.  As an AMSAA analyst, Dr. Ellner then went on to develop multiple new models and statistical methodologies to improve Army and Department of Defense (DoD) reliability growth and reliability testing programs.  Because of his outstanding technical skills and contributions in the area of statistics, he was quickly (by 1985) selected for positions of significant technical responsibility to include Chief of the Reliability Methodology Office and Technical Expert for the Reliability Analysis Branch.  In these positions, Dr. Ellner has developed new statistical and reliability analysis methodologies for improving the reliability of multiple weapon systems, developed advanced computer models used by multiple government organizations and private sector firms, and developed new and innovative approaches for multiple Army and DoD Project Managers and contractors that have substantially contributed to the improvement of their weapon system reliability programs. Dr. has had a long and distinguished career and has been recognized as a leading technical expert in the field of statistics and reliability throughout the Army, DoD, academia and the private sector. SDNS is honored to give him this award.

The Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security is proud to announce that the 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award was given to Professor Donald P. Gaver, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. 

Professor Gaver is a native of St. Paul, Minnesota. He served in the US Navy as an Electronics Technician and earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from MIT in 1950 and 1951. He spent two years at the US Navy's Operations Group before pursuing his PhD in mathematics at Princeton University. After receiving his PhD in 1956 he was a Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University and a consultant at Westinghouse Research Laboratories. He was co-founder of the Statistics Department at Carnegie-Mellon University, along with Morris EvaliationDeGroot. He joined the Naval Postgraduate School in 1970. 

Professor Gaver is fellow of the ASA, IMS and AAAS. He is an elected member of the ISI and Sigmi Chi. His research is in the areas of applied probability modeling and statistical data analysis. He has published over a hundred technical papers. Among his many professional activities, he has served as chair of the ASA Committee on National Security and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of an ASA-SIAM book series on applied probability and statistics. He is a past member of the National Research Council's Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. While on this committee, he chaired a subcommitee that wrote a comprehensive review entitled "Combining Information," which was published by the National Academy Press. He has served on several NRC panels and he has been a reviewer of reports and handbooks including the NRC Committee Report on te Effect of the Environment on Military Operations and the Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) Primer. His research sponsors include the Commander, Operational Test and Evaluation Force; the Army Missile Command; NAVAIR; the Conventional Weapons Division, J8, of the Joint Staff; and Director, Opertional Test and Evaluation. Professor Gaver has had a long and distinguished career dedicated to promoting statistics in defense and national security. SDNS is honored to give him this award.

The 2006 recipients of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) were Nancy Spruill and Ernest Sieglie.  Dr. Nancy Spruill received her Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics in 1971.  She earned her Master of Arts in mathematical statistics in 1975, followed by her doctorate in 1980.  From 1971 to 1983, she held a variety of positions with the Center for Naval Analyses, including project director.  Dr. Spruill served on the staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1983 to 1993, culminating in the senior operations research analyst in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation.  In 1993, she joined the staff of the Defense Mapping Agency and was a member of the Reinvention Task Force for the vice president’s National Performance Review.  In 1999, she appointed director, acquisition resources and analysis for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics OUSD (AT&L).  She also manages the studies program for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.  Dr. Spruill has been a member of the Senior Executive Service since 1995. She is a certified acquisition professional and a fellow of the American Statistical Association.  Her many honors and awards include the Defense Medal for Exceptional Civilian Service, the Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, and the Hammer Award.

Dr. Ernest Seglie received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from The Cooper Union in 1967 and a Doctor in Philosophy in theoretical nuclear physics from the University of Massachusetts in 1972.  From 1972 through 1979, Dr. Seglie was a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Yale University.  In 1979, Dr. Seglie joined the Institute for Defense Analysis.  In 1988, Dr. Seglie joined the Office of the Secretary of Defense as the first Science Advisor, Operational Test and Evaluation.  He received the Andrew J. Goodpaster Award for Excellence in Research in 1987, the International Test and Evaluation Association 2009 Allen R. Matthews Award for “leadership and technical contributions to the evaluation of operational effectiveness and suitability,” and the National Defense Industrial Association Walter W. Hollis Award in 2009. In addition, he was recipient of the President of the United States Rank Conferral of Meritorious Senior Professional in 2003 and the Secretary of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service in 2010, which included mention that he “led the drive to apply statistical methods to test design and evaluation.”  Recent areas of interest included test and evaluation policy in the Department of Defense and reliability.