Virginia Tech statistics Professor Frederick Faltin has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 Gerald J. Hahn Q&P Achievement Award by the American Statistical Association. Faltin will be officially presented with the award at the organization’s annual Fall Technical Conference, which will take place Oct. 8-10 in Nashville.

The Gerald J. Hahn Q&P Achievement Award is named for the first chair of the American Statistical Association’s Quality and Productivity section. It recognizes an individual who has demonstrated outstanding and sustained achievement and leadership in developing, promoting, and successfully improving the quality and productivity of products and organizational performance using statistical concepts and methods over a period of 20 or more years.

“In a career spanning over 40 years, Fred Faltin has made significant contributions to our field as a researcher, consultant, author, and educator,” said award nominator Necip Doganaksoy, a professor in Siena College’s School of Business and former colleague of Faltin’s at GE Energy.

Faltin, professor of practice in the Department of Statistics, has served as a director of the Computational Modeling and Data Analytics Capstone course since 2018. A graduation requirement for all students enrolled in the computational modeling and data analytics major, the capstone course groups teams of three to four students each semester to tackle an open-ended, client-driven real-world project.

As course director and instructor, Faltin has mentored hundreds of students in topics such as project management, technical leadership, data quality, and sample bias, as well as teaching them the ethical aspects of data science and mathematical modeling.

As computational modeling and data analytics has rapidly become one of the most popular majors in the College of Science, the demands on Faltin as a capstone course director have increased as well. To accommodate this growth, Angela Patterson, statistics professor of practice, joined Faltin as co-course director. Additionally, the capstone course is now open in both the fall and spring semesters after initially being offered just once per academic year.

“Fred brings his decades of experience to bear preparing the students for careers in industry, and I cannot overstate the impact he has had on the program,” said Ron Fricker, Virginia Tech’s vice provost for faculty affairs and former head of the statistics department. “Quite simply, the computational modeling and data analytics program is the success it is today in large part because of Fred’s leadership, his deep engagement with the students, and how he makes the program relevant to industry.”

Faltin arrived at Virginia Tech following a long career in business, which included corporate management positions in statistics and data science at Air Products & Chemicals and at GE Research. He went on to start a consulting practice with his wife, Donna, working with industry-leading clients including Agilent Technologies, Allstate, Dell, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, and UnitedHealth Group.

Elected an American Statistical Association fellow in 2002, Faltin has been best known in the profession for his work in process control and statistical process monitoring. He also earned recognition for his expertise in design of experiments, his innovations in Design for Six Sigma, and as an international consultant. He has been published in several prestigious journals in the fields of statistics and reliability/quality, and has co-edited three books in applications of statistics, including the recent "Analytic Methods in Systems and Software Testing" in 2018.

“I’m deeply grateful to the many colleagues from throughout my career who supported my nomination for the Hahn award, and of course, am greatly honored by this recognition,” said Faltin.

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