Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture

04-08-2014

The Myra Samuels Memorial Lecture is named in memory of Myra Samuels, who was associate professor of biostatistics and epidemiology in Purdue's Department of Veterinary Pathobiology and associate director of Statistical Consulting in the Department of Statistics. She received her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, under Jerzy Neyman, and taught at Purdue for 24 years. Her research was oriented toward issues in biostatistics and included both conceptual issues in mathematical statistics and collaborations on applications.

We were honored to have Dr. Peter McCullagh as our speaker. Dr. Peter McCullagh is currently the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. Peter’s research interests include statistical models and scientific applications. He is the coauthor of Generalized Linear Models. The International Statistical Institute awarded Dr. McCullagh the 2013 Karl Pearson Prize, which recognizes a contemporary research contribution that has had a profound influence on statistical theory, methodology, practice or applications.

Dr. McCullagh is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his research, including two Guy medals from the Royal Statistical Society. He also received the CPOSS President's award in 1990.

Dr. McCullagh's abstract was titled: Survival Models and Health Sequences. Medical investigations focusing on patient survival often generate not only a failure time for each patient but also a sequence of measurements on patient health at annual or semi-annual check-ups while the patient remains alive. This talk was concerned with a general technique — temporal realignment — for constructing statistical models for survival processes.

Details available: http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~pmcc/reports/revival.pdf