Invited Speakers at ICOSDA 26
Barry C. Arnold
Professor Barry Arnold’s journey in statistics began in McMaster University from where he graduated in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics (statistics). He pursued the graduate program in statistics at Stanford University, and from there joined the faculty at Iowa State University. In 1979, Barry hung up his snow shovel, donated his winter coat to the Salvation Army, and moved to the University of California, Riverside. He became a distinguished professor in the Department of Statistics, from where he retired as Professor Emeritus.
Barry is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. A quick look through Barry's publications shows his broad interests, but with greater attention to Ordered Data, Distribution Theory - Univariate and Multivariate, Characterization Problems, Statistical Inference - Classical and Bayesian, Inequalities and Majorization Problems, and Multivariate Analysis. His more than 270 research papers have appeared in a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied journals. He has served or is serving as an editor or associate editor of many journals including Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Sankhya, Communications in Statistics, Metron, and many others.
Thomas Mathew
Thomas Mathew is Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). He earned his PhD in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute in 1983, and has been a faculty member at the University of Maryland since 1985. His research interests are on both methodological and applied topics, including cost-effectiveness analysis, equivalence testing, exposure data analysis, meta-analysis, mixed and random effects models, and tolerance intervals.
He is the co-author of two books: Statistical Tests in Mixed Linear Models and Statistical Tolerance Regions: Theory, Applications and Computation, both published by Wiley. He has served on the Editorial Boards of several journals, and is currently an Associate Editor of Journal of Multivariate Analysis, and Sankhya. Dr. Mathew is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He has also been appointed as Presidential Research Professor at his campus.
Susmita Datta
Dr. Susmita Datta is Professor at University of Florida (UF), Department of Biostatistics. She is the Co-Director of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Program (BERD) of UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Dr. Datta is widely (>100) published in peer reviewed journals. Her work has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Her research area includes bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, clustering and classification techniques, infectious disease modeling, statistical issues in population biology, systems biology, survival analysis, multi-state models and big data analytics.
She has recently published a book on “Statistical Analysis of Proteomics, Metabolomics, and Lipidomics Data Using Mass Spectrometry” by Springer. Professor Datta is enthusiastic in promoting women in STEM fields and has served as President of Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS) and is presently appointed to the Committee of Women in Statistics of ASA (COWIS). She is the founding executive committee member of the Women in Statistics and Data Science conference (WSDS).
Hon Keung Tony Ng
Hon Keung Tony Ng is a Professor with the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA. He received a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada, in 2002. He is the co-editor of Communications in Statistics – Simulation and Computation, an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Naval Research Logistics, Sequential Analysis, and Statistics & Probability Letters, and serves on the editorial board of International Journal of Reliability, Quality and Safety Engineering, and Statistical Methods & Applications.
His research interests include reliability, censoring methodology, degradation modeling, ordered data analysis, non-parametric methods, and statistical inference. He has published over 190 research papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is the co-author of the books Precedence-Type Tests and Applications (Wiley, 2006) and Fiber Bundles: Statistical Models and Applications (Springer, 2023), and co-editor of Ordered Data Analysis, Modeling, and Health Research Methods; Statistical Modeling for Degradation Data; Statistical Quality Technologies: Theory and Practice; Bayesian Inference and Computation in Reliability and Survival Analysis; and Recent Advances on Sampling Methods and Educational Statistics. Professor Ng is an elected senior member of IEEE (2008), an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (2008), an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association (2016), and a senior member of the American Society for Quality (2025).
Ruth Pfeiffer
Dr. Pfeiffer is a tenured senior investigator in the Biostatistics Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA. She received an M.S. degree in applied mathematics from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, and an M.A. degree in applied statistics and a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics—both from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. Her research focuses on statistical methods for risk prediction, methods for high-dimensional molecular data and for the design and analysis of observational studies.
She co-authored the book “Absolute Risk: Methods and Applications in Clinical Management and Public Health”, published by Chapman & Hall/CRC Monographs on Statistics & Applied Probability. She is an active collaborator on many observational studies of cancer and other diseases. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, an elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Dr. Pfeiffer has supervised many Master’s theses and PhD dissertations in statistics and biostatistics, summer interns and postdoctoral fellows, who all have gone on to productive careers. She received the NCI mentoring award.
Carl Lee
Dr. Carl Lee is an Emeritus Professor and the founding chair of the Department of Statistics, Actuarial and Data Sciences at Central Michigan University (CMU). He received a B.S. in Agronomy from National Taiwan University and PhD in Statistics from Iowa State University. His research interests span statistical distributions, predictive modeling, and statistical education. Dr. Lee is renowned for his significant contributions to the field, including creating new frameworks for developing generalized statistical distributions and being a pioneer in the Statistics Education Reform movement in the early 2000s.
He is a co-founder of the ICOSDA conference. He is a founding member of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) and the founder of the Undergraduate Statistics Project Competition (USPROC). Dr. Lee is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an Elected member of the International Statistical Institute for significant contributions in statistical profession. He also received the 2019 Deborah & Franklin Tepper Haimo Award from the Mathematical Association of America for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics and the 2022 Distinguished Professor Award from The Michigan Association of State Universities.
Nilanjan Chatterjee
Dr. Chatterjee is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Department of Biostatistics, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Department of Oncology School of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he led the Biostatistics Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics of the US National Cancer Institute during 2008-2015. He is known for foundational and methodological contributions to multiple areas of modern biomedical data science, including large-scale analysis of genetic associations, gene-environment interactions, and predictive model building by synthesis of information from various data sources.
He has received numerous prestigious national and international awards, including the celebrated Committee of the Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) President’s Award. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and American Epidemiological Society. He serves on the scientific advisory committee of the Radiation Effect Research Foundation, Hiroshima, Japan and the Population and Prevention Research Committee of the foundation of Cancer Research UK.
Narayanswamy Balakrishnan
Professor Balakrishnan is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, Honorary Member of the Greek Statistical Institute, and many more, including the Professor C. R. Rao Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020, by the Indian Society for Probability and Statistics. He has received many distinctions including Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of the American Statistical Association and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In addition, he has received Honorary Doctorates from The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and The University of Medallin, Colombia.
He is at present the Editor-in-Chief of Communications in Statistics and Mathematical Methods of Statistics. His research interests include ordered data analysis, univariate and multivariate distribution theory, reliability theory, survival analysis, applied probability, stochastic orderings, nonparametric statistics, censoring methodology, and statistical inference. “Bala”, as he prefers to be called, has close to 100 thousand citations of his work and a H-Index of 87! He holds editorial positions in more than 20 scholarly and professional journals, as well as over 60 distinguished visiting professorship positions in many universities around the world.