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November 5, 2004

Royal Society of Canada Honors Acclaimed Carnegie Mellon Statistics Professor

Stephen E. Fienberg

PITTSBURGH—Stephen E. Fienberg, the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has been elected a Fellow by The Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of the Sciences and Humanities, in recognition of his fundamental and innovative contributions to the statistical theory and methodology for the analysis of categorical data. He will be inducted in a ceremony on November 20 in Hull, Quebec.

The Royal Society of Canada is the senior national body of distinguished Canadian scientists and scholars. Fellowship in the Society is one of the most prestigious academic accolades a Canadian scientist can receive, and Fienberg, who was born and raised in Canada, joins only a handful of other statisticians as a Fellow. It is akin to election as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an honor Fienberg received several years ago.

"Because Fellowship is so rarely bestowed upon Canadians living outside of Canada, I was especially gratified by my election. At Carnegie Mellon, there are several other distinguished Canadians who would clearly be Royal Society members were they living in Canada," Fienberg said.

Fienberg, who has taught at Carnegie Mellon since 1980, is one of the world's leading experts in statistics and its application. He has advised numerous U.S. government agencies on statistical matters. He is a past chair of the National Research Council's Committee on National Statistics and chaired the NRC Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph, whose report challenged the scientific validity of lie detector tests for security purposes. Fienberg is the co-author of "Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America." He has served as head of Carnegie Mellon's Department of Statistics and as dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is also a faculty member in the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery in the School of Computer Science and CyLab, Carnegie Mellon's center for computer and communications security. In the spring, he was named a Fellow by The American Academy of Political and Social Science.