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. Joanne Wendelberger joined the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1992 as a Technical Staff Member. She served in multiple leadership roles as an R&D Manager for the Statistical Sciences Group and the Computer, Computational, and Statistical Sciences Division prior to her current position as a senior level Scientist. She previously worked as a Statistical Consultant at the General Motors Research Laboratories. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics in 1991 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was influenced by quality leaders Bill Hunter, George Box, and Brian Joiner.

Joanne Wendelberger

Throughout her career, Dr. Wendelberger’s research has been motivated by the need to develop solutions to complex interdisciplinary problems, with a growing focus on the interface between statistics and computer science. Her current research interests include statistical experimental design and test planning, statistical bounding and uncertainty, materials degradation modeling, sampling and analysis in large-scale computation and visualization, probabilistic computing, and education modeling. She has published on these topics extensively. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ). She was selected as the W. J. Youden Memorial Address speaker for the 2016 Fall Technical Conference. She has served as an Associate Editor for Technometrics and as an ASQ representative for the Technometrics Management Committee.

In addition to her professional career contributions, Dr. Wendelberger has sought opportunities to inspire the use of Statistics in her local community. Following the lead of Bill Hunter, she has encouraged the use of statistical concepts and effective problem solving techniques for a number of community organizations and forums including a cooperative preschool, a gymnastics school, a soccer league, a scholarship committee, a community discussion of alternative school calendars, and numerous educational outreach activities.