Lin Elected Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Dennis Lin, professor of statistics at Penn State University, has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), which honored him "for his contributions to experimental design and response-surface methodology, and for service to the profession." This is Lin's fifth professional Fellow.

Dennis Lin's research focuses on statistical methodologies related to business, industry, and government. In particular, much of his work has been in the area of data mining; experimental design; quality assurance (including the quality-assurance method, Six Sigma); statistical process control; reliability; and response-surface methodology (a statistical technique for examining the relationships between "explanatory" and "response" variables and subsequently optimizing the response variables). Lin also uses supersaturated design, which allows him to investigate many variables using a relatively small number of experimental runs. To do his work, Lin makes use of statistical tools, such as statistical modeling, number theory, Bayesian inference, optimal-design theory, optimization, and time-series analysis. He currently is working on problems related to radio-frequency identification (RFID) and Internet search engines.

Lin has won numerous honors and awards, including a Faculty Scholar Medal from Penn State in 2004 and the Mercator Visiting Professorship Award from the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) program in 2008. He was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998, a Fellow of the American Society for Quality in 2006, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute in 1995, and a Fellow of The Royal Statistical Society in 1993. In 2008, he was named the Chang-Jiang Scholar at the Remin University of China by the Chinese government's Department of Education.

Lin is the author of nearly 200 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and of several book chapters. He holds two patents, and he has presented talks at numerous conferences worldwide. He has served as a co-editor of the journal Applied Stochastic Model for Business and Industry and as an associate editor of various top-ranked journals, including Technometrics, Statistica Sinica, Journal of Quality Technology, Journal of Data Science, Journal of Statistics and Its Applications, and Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice. Lin is an Honorary Chair Professor at research institutions including the National Chengchi University and the National Sun Yet-Sen University in Taiwan and Fudan University, the XiAn Statistical Institute, and Renmin University in China.

Before joining the faculty at Penn State in 1995, Lin served as a faculty member at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Lin received a doctoral degree in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988 and a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan in 1981.

Created in 1933, the IMS is an organization that fosters the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability. The IMS has 4,500 active members throughout the world, but only around five percent have earned the status of fellowship. Fellows are elected based on demonstrated distinction in statistics or probability research, and by publication of independent work of merit.