Biography:Mary Ellen Bock

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Short description: American statistician
Mary Ellen Bock
Mary Ellen Johnston Bock
Alma materUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics
InstitutionsPurdue University
ThesisCertain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution (1974)

Mary Ellen Johnston Bock is a retired American statistician, now a professor emeritus at Purdue University[1] after becoming the first female full professor of statistics and the first female chair of the department there.[2] She was president of the American Statistical Association in 2007.[3]

Education and career

As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Bock earned a bachelor's degree in the German language in 1967.[1] She switched to mathematics for her graduate studies at the same university, completing her PhD in 1974 under the supervision of Robert B. Ash with a dissertation on Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution.[1][4][5]

As chair of statistics at Purdue from 1995 to 2010, Bock led the department through a period of growth, and took a multidisciplinary approach to the subject that included computational statistics as well as application areas including biostatistics, statistical finance, and environmental statistics.[2]

Awards and honors

Bock is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,[1] and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.[6] She won the Founders Award of the American Statistical Association in 2013.[1]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "Mary Ellen Bock", Faculty Directory (Purdue University Department of Statistics), http://www.stat.purdue.edu/people/faculty/mbock, retrieved 2017-10-14 
  2. 2.0 2.1 Srivastava, Sanvesh; Doerge, Rebecca W. (2012), "Purdue Statistics: A Journey Through Time", in Agresti, Alan; Meng, Xiao-Li, Strength in Numbers: The Rising of Academic Statistics Departments in the U. S., Springer, pp. 229–242, doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3649-2_17, ISBN 9781461436492 . See in particular "Mary Ellen Bock's Era: Adapting to the Changing Times (1995–2010)", pp. 235–238.
  3. Pearson, Willie; Frehill, Lisa M.; McNeely, Connie L., eds. (2015), Advancing Women in Science: An International Perspective, Springer, p. 209, ISBN 9783319086293, https://books.google.com/books?id=wb6pCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA209 
  4. Mary Ellen Bock at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. M. E. Bock (January 1975). "Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution". Ann. Statist. 3 (1): 209–218. doi:10.1214/aos/1176343009. 
  6. Honored Fellows, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, https://www.imstat.org/honored-ims-fellows/, retrieved 2018-10-27