Mu Sigma Rho:
The National Statistics Honorary Society

Mu Sigma Rho is the national honorary society for statistics. Its purpose is the promotion and encouragement of scholarly activity in statistics, and the recognition of outstanding achievement among the students and instructional staff in eligible academic institutions.

Mu Sigma Rho involves graduate students at all levels, undergraduates, faculty and professional statisticians. Activities include outreach and service to the profession.

 

2024 Award Recipients

David Hitchcock of the University of South Carolina

Recipient of the 2024 William D. Warde Statistics Education Award

David Hitchcock has taught for 20 years as a faculty member in the statistics department at the University of South Carolina, teaching a range of courses from 200-person introductory courses to small graduate-level courses, and supervising the research of 14 Ph.D. students, 17 master’s students, and 16 senior thesis students. He has served as an advisor for the Mu Sigma Rho chapter at South Carolina and the Statistics Club. He developed an innovative discussion-based History of Statistics course in 2023; an article describing this course is appearing in The American Statistician. His students’ successes during their time in school and beyond are what have brought him the most happiness in his career.

 

N. Justice of Pacific Lutheran University

Recipient of the 2024 Early Career Undergraduate Impact Award

Dr. N. Justice works to provide deep and rich opportunities for undergraduate students in statistics. During her time at PLU, she has been a driving force behind the development of first a data-science minor, and then a data science major. For these two academic programs, she created two new courses, Statistical Consulting and Statistical Modeling, that provide students with numerous ways to interact with data-science techniques and to grapple with important ethical issues in the field. She also was a leader in bringing DataFest to PLU, offering students opportunities to glean insights from rich, messy data sets.

Dr. Justice’s influence reaches beyond PLU. She served as a member of the founding team of the ASA Statistics Education Section mentoring program for several years—a program through which numerous novice statistics teachers throughout the country have since found support and encouragement to improve their teaching. Dr. Justice has also conducted collaborative research on students’ and teachers’ understanding of and experiences in statistics, as well as students’ emerging identities as statisticians. She often includes undergraduates in her scholarship and has many publications with undergraduate coauthors. Finally, last year she began a tradition of opening up the PLU DataFest competition to students from other institutions in the surrounding region, giving them rich opportunities to work with data as well.

Through her dedication to her students’ learning and her scholarship connected to statistics education, she has demonstrated that she is deserving of the Mu Sigma Rho Early Career Undergraduate Impact Award.

Call for Nominations

Call for Nominations: Mu Sigma Rho Early Career Undergraduate Impact Award (PDF)

Call for Nominations: Mu Sigma Rho William D. Warde Statistics Education Award (PDF)

Previous Recipients:

Information and Important Links

Join Mu Sigma Rho (PDF)

Start a Mu Sigma Rho Chapter (PDF)

Current National Officers (PDF)

Chapters and their Representatives (PDF)

Constitution and Bylaws (PDF)

Archived Mu Sigma Rho Newsletters

Alpha Chapter Charter

Awards (PDF)