Albert honored with professional award

Dr. James Albert, mathematics and statistics, has received the prestigious Founders Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA). Albert was among three people honored with the award last month at the association’s presidential awards ceremony at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings, held in Seattle.

The ASA is the nation's preeminent professional statistical society.

“The Founders Award is the American Statistical Association’s highest recognition for distinguished service and leadership within the association and the statistical science profession,” said ASA President David R. Morganstein.

To be eligible for the honor, ASA members must have served the association and its membership over an extended period and in a variety of volunteer leadership roles.

Albert was honored “for outstanding leadership and efforts in statistical education and relationship building between academia and industry; for service as editor of The American Statistician and the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports and as a member of the Significance editorial board; for major contributions as associate editor of several ASA journals; for chairing and participating in numerous ASA committees and councils devoted to statistics education, Bayesian statistics and two sports statistics; and for heightening interest in statistics through the use of sports examples and applications presented in papers, technical reports, lectures, blogs and books.”

At BGSU, Albert has partnered with colleague Dr. Maria Rizzo to create a data science specialization in the Bachelor of Science in Mathematics degree program, with support from the National Science Foundation. The curriculum is designed to integrate essential statistics and mathematics training with a strong computational component and research experience with real data.   

Albert is the author and co-author of several books, including “Teaching Statistics Using Baseball” (2002) and “Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics and the Role of Chance in the Game” (2001).

He joined the faculty at BGSU in 1979 after receiving his Ph.D. in statistics from Purdue University. In 1994-95 he was a visiting professor at Duke University’s Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences. An expert in Bayesian analysis, Albert has written specialized software for teaching the theory and for other topics in math and statistics.