Biography:Yvonne Bishop

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Short description: American statistician
Yvonne Bishop
Died(2015-05-26)May 26, 2015
TitleDirector of the Office of Statistical Standards, Energy Information Administration
Academic background
Alma materHarvard University
ThesisMulti-Dimensional Contingency Tables: Cell Estimates (1967)
Academic work
DisciplineStatistics
Sub-disciplineBiostatistics
InstitutionsHarvard School of Public Health,
United States Department of Energy,
Energy Information Administration
Notable worksDiscrete Multivariate Analysis: Theory and Practice

Yvonne Millicent Mahala Bishop (died May 26, 2015)[1] was an English-born[2] statistician who spent her working life in America. She wrote a "classic" book on multivariate statistics, and made important studies of the health effects of anesthetics and air pollution. Later in her career, she became the Director of the Office of Statistical Standards in the Energy Information Administration.

Education

Bishop completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1967; her dissertation was Multi-Dimensional Contingency Tables: Cell Estimates.[3] As a student, she also made significant contributions to a national study of the side-effects of halothane anesthetics,[4] and temporarily moved to Stanford University to take part in the study.[5]

Writing of her during this period, Frederick Mosteller says that she already had significant experience in biology. She had worked in the fishing and fishery industry, but moved to health and medicine after experiencing too much discrimination as a woman in the fisheries. Mosteller writes that she had "a remarkable ability to get things done", and that she wrote several chapters of the halothane report.[5]

Career

After completing her doctorate, Bishop worked for the Children's Cancer Research Foundation, and as a faculty member in the biostatistics department of the Harvard School of Public Health.[6] At Harvard, she became one of the lead researchers of the Harvard Six Cities study, an influential work on the effects of air pollution on public health.[7][8] In 1975, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[9]

By 1982 Bishop had moved to Washington, D.C., where she was listed as deputy assistant director for energy data operations at the United States Department of Energy.[10] In 1996 she was listed as Director of the Office of Statistical Standards in the Energy Information Administration.[11]

Book

With Stephen Fienberg and Paul W. Holland, Bishop became the author of a book on multivariate statistics, Discrete Multivariate Analysis: Theory and Practice (MIT Press, 1975; Springer, 2007).[12] By 1980 the book had already become regarded as a "classic" in the field.[13]

References

  1. "Dr. Yvonne M. Bishop", The Washington Post, 2015-06-06, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/washingtonpost/obituary.aspx?pid=175019611 
  2. "Obituaries for October 2015" (in en-US). October 2015. https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2015/10/01/obituaries-for-october-2015/. 
  3. Bishop, Yvonne Millicent Mahala, Multi-Dimensional Contingency Tables: Cell Estimates, ProQuest 302255816 
  4. National Research Council Subcommittee on the National Halothane Study (1969), Bunker, John P., ed., The National Halothane Study: A Study of the Possible Association Between Halothane Anesthesia and Postoperative Hepatic Necrosis, National Academies 
  5. 5.0 5.1 Mosteller, Frederick (2010), The Pleasures of Statistics: The Autobiography of Frederick Mosteller, Springer, pp. 78–79, ISBN 9780387779560, https://books.google.com/books?id=Eu9ZsgGWAfkC&pg=PA78 
  6. "Association News", American Journal of Public Health 63 (7): 576–666, July 1973, doi:10.2105/ajph.63.7.576-b 
  7. The Department of Biostatistics: A Timeline, Harvard Department of Biostatistics, 2015-03-03, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/biostatistics/history/, retrieved 2017-11-23 
  8. Laird, Nan; Zelen, Marvin (2012), "Harvard University Department of Biostatistics", in Agresti, Alan; Meng, Xiao-Li, Strength in Numbers: The Rising of Academic Statistics Departments in the U. S., Springer, pp. 77–90, doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3649-2_7, ISBN 9781461436492 . See especially p. 83.
  9. ASA Fellows list, American Statistical Association, http://www.amstat.org/ASA/Your-Career/Awards/ASA-Fellows-list.aspx, retrieved 2017-11-15 
  10. Eldridge, Marie D.; Wallman, Katherine K.; Wulfsberg, Rolf M.; Bailar, Barbara A.; Bishop, Yvonne M.; Kibler, William E.; Orleans, Beatrice S.; Rice, Dorothy P. et al. (May 1982), "Preparing Statisticians for Careers in the Federal Government: Report of the ASA Section on Statistical Education Committee on Training of Statisticians for Government", The American Statistician 36 (2): 69–81, doi:10.1080/00031305.1982.10482784 
  11. Residential Energy Consumption Survey Quality Profile, U.S. Department of Energy, March 1996, https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/1993/pdf/555961a.pdf 
  12. Reviews of Discrete Multivariate Analysis:
  13. Srivastava, Rajendra K. (August 1980), "Discrete Multivariate Analysis Books: A Review", Journal of Marketing Research 17 (3): 395–402, doi:10.1177/002224378001700316