Lin selected to participate in Penn State, National Taiwan Normal University collaboration

Dennis Lin, Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Penn State, has been selected as an awardee of the 2019 Joint Collaboration Development Fund between Penn State and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). Seven projects were chosen for funding, in a variety of disciplines, from math education to geosciences to information sciences and technology.

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 dimensional analysis, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and Internet search engines.

Lin was honored with the title of Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Penn State in 2015. He also has been honored as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2013, a Fellow of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in 2006, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute in 1995, and a Fellow of The Royal Statistical Society in 1988. Lin received the William G. Hunter Award in 2014 and the Shewell Award in 2010, both from the ASQ. He was honored with the Don Owen Award from the American Statistical Association in 2011. Lin has presented several distinguished lectures, including both the 2010 Youden Address for the ASQ and the 2011 Loutit Address for the Statistical Society of Canada. He received the Mercator Visiting Professorship Award from the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) program and was named the Chang-Jiang Scholar at the Remin University of China by the Chinese government's Department of Education in 2008. He was honored with a Faculty Scholar Medal from Penn State in 2004.

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 Models in Business and Industry and as an associate editor of various journals, including Technometrics, Statistica Sinica, the Journal of Quality Technology, the Journal of Data Science, and the Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice. Lin holds honorary positions 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.

Penn State NTNU Collaboration

Penn State and NTNU have collaborated closely in the recent past. The partnership began in 2013 in the areas of education and psychology. Since then, the two universities have held a Joint Workshop on Advanced Learning Sciences every year, with each year’s conference being held in a different location.

The two institutions also work closely on benchmarking initiatives focused around three main themes: first year experience; leadership and civic education; and online learning. In fact, a delegation from NTNU visited Penn State within the last week to discuss these initiatives.

“The collaboration between the two universities has been going quite strongly,” said Rose Tan, strategic initiatives coordinator, who works with Penn State’s partners in Asia. “We have been lucky to have strong champions like Dean [David] Monk [College of Education] and Professor Ping Li [Department of Psychology], who is the faculty champion.”

Monk and Li sat on Penn State’s review committee for the projects this go-around. Three projects were fully funded and four were partially funded. Other Penn State professors who received the funding to work with counterparts at NTNU to carry out their research include:

• Martin K.-C. Yeh, assistant professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State Brandywine
• Roman DiBiase, assistant professor of geosciences
• Hartono Tjoe, assistant professor of mathematics education, Penn State Berks
• Sadan Kulturel-Konak, professor of management information systems, Penn State Berks
• James Kasting, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences
• Esther Obonyo, associate professor of architectural engineering

“We are so excited that the partnership has grown into a cross-disciplinary collaboration,” said Tan. “We see great things in the future.”

For more information on the Penn State-NTNU partnership, contact Rose Tan, Office of Strategic Initiatives, at lut15@psu.edu.