The UC Berkeley Department of Statistics community was widely recognized at the Joint Statistical Meeting recently held in Nashville, TN. Professor Emeritus Peter Bickel was chosen to give the prestigious Le Cam Lecture, while current faculty members Sandine Dudoit '99 and Song Mei each were awarded the Medallion Award and the Noether Award, respectively. Current Ph.D. student Andy Shen won one of the 2025 Student Paper Competitions. Lastly, Ph.D. program alum Jianqing Fan '89 received the Wald Award, and fellow alum Yuting Wei '18 won a Noether Award.

"We are thrilled that the Berkeley Statistics community was so widely recognized at this year's JSM," said Chair Ryan Tibshirani. "It is wonderful to see Peter, Sandrine, and Jianqing be recognized for their illustrious careers while Song, Yuting, and Andy are creating research that is having a significant impact on the discipline."

A Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School, Bickel's research has focused on several related theoretical topics, including nonparametric methods, robustness, semiparametric models and methods, sequential analysis, and, more recently, inference in network models. In addition, he has worked in several areas of application. Throughout his noted career, Bickel has served as President of the Bernoulli Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a MacArthur Fellow, a COPSS prize winner, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1986, and from ETH, Zurich, in 2014. 

Named after one of the founders of the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics, the Lucien La Cam Award and Lecture is presented to a person whose contributions have been fundamental to the development of mathematical statistics or probability. The Le Cam award is given every three years. 

Professor Sandrine Dudoit's research and teaching activities concern the development and application of statistical methods and software for the analysis of biomedical and genomic data. Dudoit currently serves as Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Dudoit is a former Chair of Statistics and a Fellow at the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association.

The Committee on Special Lectures invites eight individuals to deliver Medallion Awards and Lectures annually. Medallion Awards and Lectures are distinct from Invited Papers, which the various Program Committees choose for specific meetings. Each Medallion Awardee and Lecturer receives a Medallion in a brief ceremony preceding the lecture.

Song Mei is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford, advised by Andrea Montanari. Mei's research is motivated by data science and AI and lies at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, information theory, and computer science. His research interests include foundations of deep learning and generative AI, reinforcement learning theory, and high-dimensional statistics. In 2024, he received the NSF CAREER Award, the Google Research Scholar Award, and the Amazon Research Award. 

The Noether Award Committee selects the Noether Distinguished Scholar based on outstanding contributions to the theory, methodology, and/or novel applications to nonparametric statistics—interpreted broadly—that have had substantial, sustained impact on the subject, its practical applications, and its pedagogy. The Noether Early Career Scholar is selected based on significant accomplishments in nonparametric statistics, interpreted broadly to include theory, methodology, and outstanding applications.

Andy Shen is a current Ph.D. student co-advised by Professors Haiyan Huang and Sam Pimentel. His research is focused on causal inference problems in health policy and medicine. Shen is interested in developing methods to help scientists make robust and transparent causal claims, solving data-driven problems using causal inference, machine learning, and survival analysis. He is currently interning at Genentech in the Product Development Data Sciences group. Shen's paper was submitted within the Mental Health Statistics Section of the competition. 

Jianqing Fan is the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Statistics, and Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. His research interests include statistical theory and methods in data science, statistical machine learning, finance, economics, computational biology, biostatistics, with particular skills on high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, spectral methods, neural networks, reinforcement learning, nonparametric modeling,  longitudinal and functional data analysis, survival analysis, nonlinear time series, wavelets, among others. The Wald Memorial Award and Lecture is an annual lecture that honors Abraham Wald. It is presented to an individual whose contributions have been fundamental to the development of statistics or probability. While at Berkeley, he was advised by David Donoho and Peter Bickel.

Yuting Wei is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Wei's research interests lie broadly in the span of statistics, mathematical optimization, information theory, and machine learning. More specifically, she has been developing theoretical and algorithmic tools for learning from high dimensional and structured data, and understanding the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning and diffusion models. She is also interested in statistical problems arising from genetics and genomics. She was advised by Martin Wainwright and Aditya Guntuboyina.

-Alex Coughlin