Lin selected as 2020 Deming Lecturer

Distinguished Professor of Statistics Dennis Lin has been selected as the 2020 Deming Lecturer by the American Statistical Association (ASA). He was selected for his outstanding leadership and innovation in the field of quality and statistics.

The award highlights Lin’s accomplishments as an educator, practitioner, and integrator of statistical methodology with other disciplines, from business and industry to government, specifically in the areas of data science, experimental design, quality engineering, statistical process control, and reliability. He was nominated by former Deming Lecturer Roger Hoerl.

Lin will present the 2020 Deming Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia on August 4th at 4:00 p.m.

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, internet search engines, and data science.

Lin has published nearly 250 Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) papers in a wide variety of journals. He currently serves or has served as an associate editor for more than 10 professional journals and was a co-editor for Applied Stochastic Models for Business and Industry. Lin is an elected fellow of ASA, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), The American Society for Quality (ASQ) and RSS, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), and a lifetime member of International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA). He is an honorary chair professor for various universities, including a Chang-Jiang Scholar at Renmin University of China. His recent awards include the Youden Address from ASQ in 2010, the Shewell Award from ASQ in 2010, the Don Owen Award from ASA in 2011, the Loutit Address from the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) in 2011, the Hunter Award from ASQ in 2014, the Shewhart Medal from ASQ in 2015, the Statistics in Physical Engineering Sciences (SPES) Award from ASA in 2016, and the Chow Yuan-Shin Award in 2019.

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

The Deming Lecturer Award was established in 1995 to honor the accomplishments of W. Edwards Deming, recognize the accomplishments of the awardee, and enhance the awareness among the statistical community of the scope and importance of Deming’s contributions. More information about the Deming Lecturer Award can be found on the ASA website.