De Veaux Named 2008 Statistician of the Year
WILLIAMSTOWN — Professor of statistics Richard D. De Veaux was named the 2008 Mosteller Statistician of the Year at an award ceremony on March 11.The award is presented by the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association every year to a distinguished statistician who has made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and has shown outstanding service to the statistical community.
The prize is named for Charles Frederick Mosteller, one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century, and founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department.
De Veaux's contributions to the field of statistics have been prodigious. His research focuses on data mining, its methodology, and its application to problems in science and industry, including artificial neural networks and advanced statistical techniques, including decision trees, MARS and boosting algorithms.
He joined the Williams College faculty in 1994.
He has also taught at the biometry unit of INRA (the French Agricultural Institute); the Probability and Statistics Laboratory in Toulouse, France; the UFR Biomedical
Department in Paris; and the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University, where he was the William R. Kenan Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching in 2006-07.
De Veaux is the co-author of a number of textbooks on statistics, including "Intro Stats," "Stats: Data and Models," and "Stats: Modeling the World." The textbooks are designed for reaching out to the "math-phobic." The journal American Statistician has called his work "accessible, non-threatening, and occasionally quite funny."
He holds a number of patents and has consulted with American Express, Bell Communications, First USA Bank, Merck Laboratories, and the National Security Agency among others. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association.
He earned his undergraduate and bachelor of science in education in civil engineering from Princeton University in 1973, and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1986.
Before coming to Williams, De Veaux held posts at Princeton and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
