Part of the Inaugural Princeton S. S. Wilks Memorial Lecture Series

Abstract: Statistics and statisticians spend much of their time and effort working at the interface of other fields and dealing with problems arising in the course of public policy. In this presentation, I describe several of my own experiences and how such work, especially that associated with problems arising at the national level, has shaped my statistical research and activities. What I and others have done in bringing statistics in service to the nation is rooted in a tradition set in motion many years ago by statistical leaders such as Sam Wilks at Princeton University.

Biography: Stephen E. Fienberg is Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, the Heinz College, and Cylab. He is the Carnegie Mellon co‐director of the Living Analytics Research Centre, a joint project with Singapore Management University. He is the author or editor of over 20 books and 400 papers and related publications. His 1975 book on categorical data analysis with Bishop and Holland, Discrete Multivariate Analysis: Theory and Practice, and his 1980 book The Analysis of Cross‐Classified Categorical Data are both Citation Classics He is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.