William G. Hunter Award 2012: Christine Anderson-Cook

The recipient of the 2012 William G. Hunter Award is Christine Anderson-Cook. The Statistics Division of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) established the Hunter Award in 1987 in memory of the Division's founding chair to promote, encourage and acknowledge outstanding accomplishments during a career in the broad field of applied statistics. The attributes that characterize Bill Hunter's career - consultant, educator for practitioners, communicator, and integrator of statistical thinking into other disciplines - are used to help decide the recipient.

Dr. Anderson-Cook has been a research scientist and statistician at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 2004, after spending 8 years in the Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech. She is a Fellow of the ASA and ASQ, and recently co-authored a special issue in Quality Engineering on "Statistical Engineering". She is the co-author of a book on Response Surface Methodology with Raymond H. Myers and Douglas C. Montgomery. She has over 100 publications in statistics and quality journals. She is a regular contributor to the Statistics Roundtable in Quality Progress, and served on the editorial boards of Technometrics, Journal of Quality Technology, Quality Engineering and Quality and Reliability Engineering International.

During her acceptance talk at the Fall Technical Conference in St Louis in October 2012, Christine sadly noted that she represented a changing of the guard, since she was the first recipient of the William G. Hunter Award with no personal memory of Bill Hunter during the span of her career. She was just starting her education as a statistician around the time of his untimely death. Her love of design of experiments was born and fostered in a first undergraduate class using Box, Hunter and Hunter. In reading about Bill Hunter's remarkable career and achievements, it is obvious how clearly he saw the big picture - what is important statistically, scientifically, but also what is important in life. Not only is he a great model for statisticians, but also for all of us to think about our contributions in a larger context.

Christine thanked the many mentors and role models who helped her develop her skills that are the criteria for the William G. Hunter Award. She appreciated the support and advice in the following areas: "a communicator (Raymond H. Myers), a consultant (R. Jock MacKay), an educator (Ray Myers), an innovator (C.F.J. Wu and Douglas C. Montgomery), an integrator of statistics with other disciplines (Roger Hoerl, Ron Snee and all her colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory) and an implementer who obtains meaningful results (Sallie Keller)." She is also deeply grateful to Connie M. Borror for nominating her for the award.