About Us

CHANCE is copublished quarterly by the American Statistical Association and Taylor & Francis Group. The magazine is designed for anyone who has an interest in the analysis of data, informally highlighting sound statistical practice. CHANCE is not a technical magazine, but rather a cultural record of an evolving field, intended to entertain as well as inform.

Since its creation in 1988, CHANCE has covered such topics as the 1990 census adjustment and the redesigned population survey, sports, the environment, DNA evidence in the courts, a variety of medical issues—even how to win on “Jeopardy.” CHANCE offers a unique opportunity to reach beyond statistics professionals to a more general audience.

Executive Editor

BehsetaSam Behseta earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and is a professor at California State University, Fullerton. His main research area is statistics in neuroscience. Other research interests include stochastic modeling of decisionmaking with multi-alternatives, Bayesian functional data analysis, Bayesian nonparametrics, statistical modeling of epidemiological data, and probabilistic watermarking. Behseta has trained and mentored undergraduate and graduate students.

Advisory Editors

larsenMichael Larsen earned his PhD in statistics from Harvard University and is associate professor of statistics at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has been on the faculty at Iowa State University and The University of Chicago and worked as a consultant with the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, NORC, and the Gallup Organization, Inc. His research interests include survey sampling, missing data, record linkage, statistical modeling, applied statistics, and statistics education.

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stanglDalene Stangl is professor of the practice of statistics and public policy and associate chair of the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University in North Carolina. She is reviews editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and The American Statistician and has co-authored more than 100 articles in statistics, as well as contributed substantive research to journals in medicine and health policy. Her professional interests are hierarchical models, meta-analysis, decision analysis, and the reform of statistical education and statistical practice.

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Michael Lavine, UMass-Amherst

Hal S. Stern, University of California, Irvine

Editors

ChenouriShojaeddin Chenouri earned his PhD from the University of Waterloo and currently is an associate professor and the director of statistical consulting center at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo. He serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. His research interests include data depth and it applications, high-dimensional data analysis, dimensionality reduction, statistics in neuroscience, social and epidemic networks, statistical process control, environmental and water quality research, transportation research.

dunnMichelle Dunn is a program director for statistical methodology grants at the National Cancer Institute. She did her undergraduate studies in applied mathematics at Harvard and earned her PhD in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, working with Jay Kadane on the detection of anomalies in web traffic. If she had free time, Dunn would enjoy cooking, sailing, and traveling around the world.

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evansScott Evans is a principal investigator at Harvard University and serves on an FDA advisory committee. He is the past president of the Boston Chapter of the ASA, chair of the ASA Development Committee, past chair of the Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences and Statistics in Sports sections of the ASA, and a member of the board of directors for Mu Sigma Rho. Evans has received the Robert Zackin Distinguished Collaborative Statistician Award for significant statistical contributions to HIV research, a recognition award from the Harvard School of Public Health for contributions of statistical expertise, and a distinguished service award from the ASA Council of Chapters.

gelmanAndrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received many awards, including the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association and the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review. He has coauthored many books; his most recent is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.

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hardinJo Hardin is an associate professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her research interests include outlier detection, clustering, and robust methods, particularly applied to large data sets. Recently, she has worked on microarray data, creating similarity measures for determining coexpression of genes. Outside of work, she enjoys reading, running, and breeding tortoises.

heYulei He is an assistant professor of health care policy, with a specialty in biostatistics, in the department of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical methods for health services and policy research.

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hortonNicholas Horton is an associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. His research interests are in longitudinal regression models and missing data methods, with applications in psychiatric epidemiology and substance abuse research. Horton’s group at Smith is also the home of the statistics haiku project.

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meyerMary Meyer is originally from Chicago and earned her PhD from the University of Michigan. She is currently associate professor of statistics at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. Her research interests are in nonparametric function estimation and inference methods using shape restrictions.

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myersKary Myers earned her degrees from Carnegie Mellon University while working on projects ranging from galaxy clusters to speech recognition to neuroimaging. As a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, she applies statistical and machine learning techniques to time series data in the context of remote sensing (not to be confused with remote viewing).

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Shane ReeseShane Reese is a professor and associate chair at Brigham Young University in the department of statistics. His research interests include reliability analysis and applications of Bayesian methods to problems in sports, national security, climate, and physical systems. He has served as an ASA chapter president twice and on several ASA committees and two National Academy of Sciences committees. Besides having a passion for the role of statistics in scientific discovery, he also enjoys playing most sports and coaching his kids in sports.

Babak Shahbaba is Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been teaching undergraduate courses such as Introduction to Biostatistics, and graduate courses such as Advanced Statistical Methods and Bayesian Analysis. His research interest is related to developing novel statistical methods to answer research questions in genomics, proteomics, and cancer studies.

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Phil Everson, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania

Samuel Kou, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Jackie Miller is a statistics education specialist at The Ohio State University.

Duane Steffey, Exponent Inc., Menlo Park, California

Column Editors

berkowitzJonathan Berkowitz, who writes Goodness of Wit Test, is a consulting statistician and president of Berkowitz & Associates Consulting, Inc. He is also a clinical associate professor in the Department of Family Practice and adjunct professor with the Sauder School of Business, both at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Berkowitz has co-written and edited many peer-reviewed journal articles, technical papers, and study reports and helped more than 100 graduate students complete their degrees. He is an active member of the National Puzzlers’ League.

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Andrew Gelman, is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received many awards, including the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association and the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review. He has coauthored many books; his most recent is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.

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glickmanMark E. Glickman, who writes Here’s to Your Health, is associate professor in the Health Policy and Management Department at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is also senior statistician at the Center for Health Quality, Outcomes and Economics Research, a Veterans Administration Center of Excellence. Much of Glickman’s work is collaborative with health services researchers on a variety of public health topics.

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jensenShane T. Jensen, who writes A Statistician Reads the Sports Pages, is an associate professor of statistics in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching since completing his PhD at Harvard University in 2004. Jensen has published more than 40 academic papers in statistical methodology for a variety of applied areas, including molecular biology, psychology, and sports. He maintains an active research program in developing sophisticated statistical models for the evaluation of player performance in baseball and hockey.

    LazarNicole Lazar, who writes The Big Picture column, earned her PhD from The University of Chicago. She is a professor in the department of statistics at the University of Georgia, and her research interests include the statistical analysis of neuroimaging data, empirical likelihood and other likelihood methods, and data visualization. She also is an associate editor of The American Statistician and The Annals of Applied Statistics and the author of The Statistical Analysis of Functional MRI Data.

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    Christian RobertChristian Robert is a professor of statistics at Université Paris-Dauphine and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has authored eight books and more than 150 papers on applied probability, Bayesian statistics, and simulation methods. Robert also served as joint editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B and associate editor for most major statistical journals. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the recipient of an IMS Medallion.

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    slavkovicAleksandra Slavkovic, who writes O Privacy, Where Art Thou?, earned her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. She is an associate professor of statistics, with appointments in the department of statistics and Institute for CyberScience at Penn State University and department of public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine. She serves as an associate editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, and Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. Her primary research interest is in data privacy and confidentiality. Other research interests include evaluation methods for human performance in virtual environments, statistical data mining, application of statistics to social sciences, algebraic statistics, and causal inference.

    Dalene Stangl is professor of the practice of statistical science and public policy and associate chair of the department of statistical science at Duke University in North Carolina. She has served in editorial positions for the Journal of the American Statistical Association, The American Statistician, and Bayesian Analysis and has co-edited two books with Donald Berry, Bayesian Biostatistics and Meta-Analysis in Medicine and Health Policy. Her primary interest is promoting Bayesian ideas in the reform of statistics education and statistical practice.

    Kari Lock Morgan earned her PhD in statistics from Harvard University and is an assistant professor of the practice in the department of statistical science at Duke University. Her primary interests are causal inference and statistics education.  She is coauthor of the book Statistics: Unlocking the Power of Data.

    Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel is an assistant professor of the practice at Duke University. Her research interests include statistics pedagogy, spatial statistics, small-area estimation, and  survey and public health data. She is a co-author of OpenIntro Statistics and a contributing member of the OpenIntro project, whose mission is to make educational products that are open-licensed, transparent, and help lower barriers to education.

    wainerHoward Wainer, who writes Visual Revelations, is currently distinguished research scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners and professor of statistics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He has won numerous awards and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Educational Research Association. His interests include the use of graphical methods for data analysis and communication, robust statistical methodology, and the development and application of generalizations of item response theory. He has published many books; his latest is The Second Watch: Navigating an Uncertain World.