Statistics Professor Wins Acclaimed Award
Mark Johnson, Ph.D., professor of Statistics, is a recipient of the American Society of Quality (ASQ) Chemical and Process Industries Division Shewell Award. Given to the best paper based on “excellence of presentation and written manuscript”, Dr. Johnson received this award at the 2015 Fall Technical Conference (FTC) held in Houston, TX. This award was shared with Christine Anderson-Cook, Ph.D., Project Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lu Lu, Ph.D., visiting assistant professor at the University of South Florida.
The Shewell Award, which is presented annually at FTC, is given to the top speakers who excel in presentation, scientific quality and applicability. The presentation was based on their 2014 joint paper “Selecting a Best Two-Level 16-run Screening Design from the Catalog of Non-Isomorphic Regular and Non-Regular Designs for Six to Eight Factors”, published in Quality Engineering Journal. Dr. Anderson-Cook presented the paper at the conference, and it was originally researched and written while Dr. Lu was a post-doctoral fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Johnson.
The Fall Technical Conference attracts practitioners and researchers from the ASQ statistics, Chemical Process Industry, and other divisions for a 2-3 day meeting where they discuss topics combining statistics and quality.
Dr. Johnson met Dr. Anderson-Cook through common research areas and the Los Alamos National Lab, and “she asked me to supervise Lu at USF in order to allow her post doc to apply outside of New Mexico. Lu turned out to be a terrific researcher and is now on a tenure track line at USF” says Dr. Johnson. Seiichi Yasui, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Administration at Tokyo University of Science, also has been working with Dr. Johnson on a companion paper dealing with other features of these designs.
This is the second time that Johnson has received the Shewell Award; the 1st time was in 1985 for “Generalized Simulated Annealing for Function Optimization,” which later appeared in the journal Technometrics. Johnson is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and has received several other awards for his research.