Posted on September 24, 2002 at 10:00 a.m.
BIRMINGHAM, AL — Jane Gentleman, Ph.D., director of the Division of Health Interview Statistics of the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, has been named the first recipient of the Janet L. Norwood Award for outstanding achievement by a woman in statistical sciences. The section on statistical genetics in the department of biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) will present the award — a plaque and $5,000 — to Gentleman during ceremonies beginning at 10:30 a.m. on October 4 at the Alys Stephens Center in Birmingham.
“Women are underrepresented in all fields of science, but especially in mathematical fields,” says David Allison, Ph.D., professor of biostatistics and head of the section on statistical genetics at UAB. “Recognizing role models like Dr. Gentleman, an enormously successful statistician who has contributed so much to the field, hopefully will attract more women to careers in statistical sciences.”
The Janet L. Norwood Award, named in honor of the former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a testament to Gentleman’s many credits as a statistician. Among her contributions to the field, Gentleman is well known for her development of new statistical computing applications. In the mid-1970s, she led a research effort pioneering the development of statistical computing and graphics software used to teach statistics.
Gentleman has authored numerous papers on statistical computing and a variety of other topics related to statistics, including public health, gerontology, molecular biology and criminology. She also has contributed to many statistical texts and served on the editorial boards of scientific journals including the Canadian Journal of Statistics, American Statistician, Canadian Journal of Statistics, Survey Methodology, Health Reports, Canadian Cancer Statistics and Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.
Among her numerous professional affiliations, Gentleman is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She has received numerous awards for her work and has been nominated for the 2002 Charles C. Shepard Award for most outstanding peer-reviewed scientific paper. Her paper, “On Judging the Significance of Differences by Examining the Overlap Between Confidence Intervals,” was published in 2001 in an issue of the American Statistician.
Gentleman received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and her master’s degree in statistics from the University of Chicago and received her doctoral degree in statistics from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She has served as a statistical programmer, professor, researcher and administrator over the course her career. She joined the National Center for Health Statistics in 1999. Prior to this, she was assistant director for analytic methods with Statistics Canada in Ottawa.
Following the presentation of her award, Gentleman will give a lecture. A luncheon will be held afterwards at 11:45 a.m. The event is free and open to the public. The deadline for reservations is October 1. For more information or to make reservations, please call (205) 975-7742.