Awards

ASA 2020 Breiman Senior Award for Trevor Hastie

The Statistical Learning and Data Science Section of the American Statistical Association has selected Trevor for their award named in honor of Professor Leo Breiman. Breiman's work helped to bridge the gap between statistics and computer science, particularly in the field of machine learning. This selection recognizes Professor Hastie's outstanding contributions to statistical learning, statistical computing, biostatistics, and applied statistical modeling, which includes a large software library of modeling tools in the R language. His five textbooks and related software are freely available to a broad audience of students and researchers and will continue to impact these fields. This latest honor is wildly well-deserved.

The award committee selects both a senior and junior scholar to receive this award every two years, based on outstanding theoretical or methodological contributions to machine learning and/or computational statistics: contributions which have made a substantial and sustained impact on the subject as well as on practical applications. For 2020, the two recipients have an additional connection, with each other and with Stanford Statistics: Breiman Junior Award winner Daniela Witten received her PhD here in 2010 and is co-author with James, Hastie, and Tibshirani of Introduction to Statistical Learning (in its 7th printing, with the 2nd edition expected later this year). Daniela is now professor of statistics and biostatistics, and Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics, at the University of Washington. Both Breiman awardees will receive their prizes at the 2021 JSM where they will present their work at a special invited session.