For
immediate release
October 2, 2003
Mount Holyoke Professor George Cobb, of Amherst,
Elected Vice-President of American Statistical Association
South Hadley, MA---George W. Cobb, Robert L. Rooke Professor
of Statistics at Mount Holyoke College, has been elected to a
three year term as vice-president of the American Statistical
Association. Founded in Boston in 1839, the American Statistical
Association is the second oldest professional society in the U.S.
Past members include Florence Nightingale, Alexander Graham Bell,
Andrew Carnegie, and Martin van Buren. The mission of the association
is to promote "excellence in statistics in its application
to the frontiers in science, from biological to socio-economic
to the physical sciences." The Association's roughly seventeen
thousand members are divided evenly among academia, government,
and business.
Cobb, who has taught at Mount Holyoke since 1974, is the first
person from a liberal arts college to be elected an officer of
the Association. Mount Holyoke is one of the very few liberal
arts colleges in the US to offer an undergraduate major in statistics.
Cobb has previously served on the National Research Council's
Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. Committees of
the National Research Council hold symposia and publish monographs
related to areas of active research considered to be of national
importance. Cobb was the first person from a liberal arts college
to serve on the statistics committee. .
