It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Professor E James Harner. Jim Harner who passed away on February 9, 2021 was Professor Emeritus of Statistics at West Virginia University (WVU). He was the Chair of the Department of Statistics for 17 years and the Director of the Cancer Center Bioinformatics Core for 15 years at WVU. He was also the Chairman of the Interface Foundation of North America which has partnered with the American Statistical Association to organize the annual Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) beginning in May, 2018. The areas of his technical and research expertise include: bioinformatics, high-dimensional modeling, high-performance computing, streaming and big data modeling and statistical machine learning.
He will be remembered fondly for his contributions to NISS, teaching a number of workshops and tutorials related to the efficient data science workflows using R and Spark.