Mary Ellen Bock
Mary Ellen Johnston Bock is a retired American statistician, now a professor emeritus at Purdue University[1] after becoming the first female full professor of statistics and the first female chair of the department there.[2] She was president of the American Statistical Association in 2007.[3]
Mary Ellen Bock | |
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Mary Ellen Johnston Bock | |
Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Statistics |
Institutions | Purdue University |
Thesis | Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution (1974) |
Education and career
As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Bock earned a bachelor's degree in the German language in 1967.[1] She switched to mathematics for her graduate studies at the same university, completing her PhD in 1974 under the supervision of Robert B. Ash with a dissertation on Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution.[1][4]
As chair of statistics at Purdue from 1995 to 2010, Bock led the department through a period of growth, and took a multidisciplinary approach to the subject that included computational statistics as well as application areas including biostatistics, statistical finance, and environmental statistics.[2]
Awards and honors
Bock is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,[1] and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.[5] She won the Founders Award of the American Statistical Association in 2013.[1]
References
- "Mary Ellen Bock", Faculty Directory, Purdue University Department of Statistics, retrieved 2017-10-14
- Srivastava, Sanvesh; Doerge, Rebecca W. (2012), "Purdue Statistics: A Journey Through Time", in Agresti, Alan; Meng, Xiao-Li (eds.), Strength in Numbers: The Rising of Academic Statistics Departments in the U. S., Springer, pp. 229–242, doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3649-2_17, ISBN 9781461436492. See in particular "Mary Ellen Bock's Era: Adapting to the Changing Times (1995–2010)", pp. 235–238.
- Pearson, Willie; Frehill, Lisa M.; McNeely, Connie L., eds. (2015), Advancing Women in Science: An International Perspective, Springer, p. 209, ISBN 9783319086293
- Mary Ellen Bock at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Honored Fellows, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, retrieved 2018-10-27