December 13, 2012, Washington D.C - Nell Sedransk, Associate Director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS), has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Also elected were two members of the NISS Board of Trustees: Karen Kafadar, professor of statistics at Indiana University, and Ronald Wasserstein, Executive Director of the American Statistical Association.
Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. This year 702 members were recognized by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on February 16 from 8 to 10 a.m. at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. This year’s AAAS Fellows were formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on November 30, 2012.
A member of Section U (Statistics), Sedransk was elected as an AAAS Fellow for her extraordinary vision, leadership, and distinguished contributions to the role of statistics in science and engineering, extending to social science, education, policy and ethics. She has been associate director of NISS since 2005, and served from 2005 to 2010 as associate director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute. She is also Research Professor at North Carolina State University.
The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association’s 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee's institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer.
Each steering group then reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list.
The Council is the policymaking body of the Association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.
About NISS
The National Institute of Statistical Sciences was established in 1990 by the national statistics societies and the Research Triangle universities and organizations, with the mission to identify, catalyze and foster high-impact, cross-disciplinary and cross-sector research involving the statistical sciences. NISS is dedicated to strengthening and serving the national statistics community, most notably by catalyzing community members’ participation in applied research driven by challenges facing government and industry. NISS also provides career development opportunities for statisticians and scientists, especially those in the formative stages of their careers. In particular, NISS has appointed more that 70 postdoctoral fellows with graduate training in statistics, computer science, mathematics, environmental sciences, psychometrics and transportation. NISS is located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
For more information about NISS, go to the website www.niss.org. You can also learn more about NISS by following our Twitter account, @NISSSAMSI, join the NISS group on LinkedIn and on Facebook.
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About AAAS
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine (www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org) and Science Signaling (www.sciencesignaling.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes 261 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.