The Statistics Division of the American Society for Quality presented Dr. James M. Lucas the 2018 William G. Hunter Award.

The William G. Hunter Award was established by the Statistics Division in 1987 to recognize the many contributions of its founding chair at promoting the use of applied statistics and statistical thinking. 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. Lucas is the principal at J. M. Lucas and Associates, a consulting firm in Statistics and Quality Management. This firm implements business systems with statistical aspects. Before starting his own consulting firm Dr. Lucas was a Senior Consultant at DuPont’s Quality Management and Technology Center for over twenty years where he conducted his early seminal workon applied statistics.

Dr. Lucas’s research focuses on practical solutions to real-world problems, emphasizing the underlying science for the problem. He has successfully integrated statistical thinking with other disciplines throughout his career. For example, he wasa major contributor to the development ofstatistical systems used throughout DuPont, including experimental design systems and statistical process control initiatives.

He has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Delaware and at Drexel University and hehas directed six PhD dissertations. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA)and of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), an Associate Editor of the Journal of QualityTechnology, and a past Associate Editor of Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems and of Technometrics.He has over 70 publications and many are cited frequently. He authored the most cited paper in two volumes of Technometrics and in two volumes of the Journal of Quality Technology.

Dr. Lucas has won many awards including the Shewhart Medal, the Brumbaugh Award, the H. O. Hartley Award, the Ellis R. Ott Foundation Award, the Don Owen Award, the Shewell Award, and the Youden Prize. He has a PhD in Statistics from Texas A&M University, a MS in Statistics from Yale University, and a BS in Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University.