Four SAS employees received honors at the Joint Statistical Meetings held last week in Washington, D.C. The largest annual gathering of statisticians held in North America, JSM 2009 was held Aug. 1- 6 and brought together more than 6,400 statisticians for presentations, panel discussions, poster presentations, continuing education courses and exhibits.
Bob Rodriguez, Senior Director of Research and Development in the Advanced Analytics Division, received the 2009 Founders Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA) at the meetings. The Founders Awards are given to ASA members who have rendered distinguished service to the association. Rodriguez was one of five individuals who received the award for 2009.
Analytical Solutions Manager Randy Tobias was among 57 individuals who were elected ASA Fellows for 2009 based on their professional contributions and leadership in the field of statistical science. Including Tobias, SAS now has eight individuals who are ASA Fellows. Others are: CEO Jim Goodnight; Executive Vice President and Co-founder John Sall; Rodriguez; Oliver Schabenberger, Research Statistician Developer; Russ Wolfinger, Analytical Solutions Manager with JMP; Bradley Jones, Director of JMP R&D; and Maura Stokes, Director of R&D.
Research Statistician Rick Wicklin and Development Tester Robert Allison captured first place for the “Best Poster in Statistical Graphics” at Data Expo 2009, held during the meetings. Wicklin and Allison won first place for their presentation, "Congestion in the Sky: Visualizing Domestic Airline Travel with SAS Software" (pdf).
After analyzing data for more than 120 million airline flights in the United States since 1987, Wicklin and Allison used SAS/GRAPH software and SAS/IML Studio to summarize the information in a small number of easy-to-read graphs.
Watch for more extensive coverage about these SAS honorees on the SAS support site blog later next week.
