Mary Ellen Bock

Mary Ellen Bock
Mary Ellen Johnston Bock
Alma materUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics
InstitutionsPurdue University
Thesis Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution  (1974)

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]

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][5]

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.[6] She won the Founders Award of the American Statistical Association in 2013.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "Mary Ellen Bock", Faculty Directory, Purdue University Department of Statistics, retrieved 2017-10-14
  2. ^ a b 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.
  3. ^ Pearson, Willie; Frehill, Lisa M.; McNeely, Connie L., eds. (2015), Advancing Women in Science: An International Perspective, Springer, p. 209, ISBN 9783319086293
  4. ^ Mary Ellen Bock at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ^ M. E. Bock (January 1975). "Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution". Ann. Statist. 3 (1): 209–218. doi:10.1214/aos/1176343009.
  6. ^ Honored Fellows, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, retrieved 2018-10-27