Clifford C. Clogg Memorial Lectures set for March 21, 22, and 23

Mark S. Handcock, Professor and Chair of Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, will present the 2016 Clifford C. Clogg Memorial Lectures on March 21, 22, and 23 at Penn State University on the University Park Campus.

The lecture series includes a free public lecture intended for a general audience, titled “Some Impacts of Social Research on Statistical Methodology,” at 5:00 p.m. on Monday, March 21, in the Berg Auditorium, 100 Huck Life Sciences Building. Handcock also will give two specialized lectures in statistics and sociology, titled “Some New Models for Social Networks,” at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday March 22, in 201 Thomas Building, and “Statistical Methods to Survey Hidden Networked Populations,” at 12:00 p.m. on Wednesday March 23, in 406 Oswald Tower.  These lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Department of Statistics and the Departments of Sociology and Criminology.

Handcock’s research involves methodological development, and is largely motivated by questions in the social sciences, demography, and epidemiology. His work focuses on the development of statistical models for the analysis of social networks, spatial processes, and longitudinal data in labor economics. He also works in the fields of distributional comparisons, environmental statistics, spatial statistics, and inference for stochastic processes.

He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Fellow of The Royal Statistical Society. In addition, he is the winner of the 2012 International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) citation award, and the recipient of the 2002 Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations. He was the editor of journals Social Networks and Journal of Statistical Software. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Western Australia and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago.

The Clifford C. Clogg Memorial Lecture honors the late Clifford C. Clogg, a distinguished professor of sociology and professor of statistics at Penn State from 1979 to 1995. He was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also provided editorial service to several journals, contributed his expertise to numerous associations and review boards, and supervised master's and doctoral students while balancing his responsibilities to his two departments at Penn State.

The lecture series was created in 1996, when funds contributed by colleagues and friends were used to establish an endowment for its support.

More details about this event are on the Web at http://stat.psu.edu/Events/2016-clogg-lecture.