Professor Emeritus William Woodall selected as recipient of Deming Lecturer Award
William Woodall, professor emeritus of statistics in the Virginia Tech College of Science, has been recognized by the American Statistical Association as the latest recipient of the prestigious Deming Lecturer Award.
As the honoree of this year’s award, Woodall will deliver the Deming Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings, a multiorganizational statistics and data science conference, on Tuesday, Aug. 6, in Portland, Oregon.
The Deming Lecturer Award was established in 1995 to honor the accomplishments of W. Edwards Deming and enhance awareness among the statistical community of the scope and importance of Deming’s contributions, as well as recognize the accomplishments of the award winner.
Award recipients are individuals who have either made significant contributions in fields related to those in which Deming devoted his career – survey sampling, statistics in the transportation industry, quality management, and quality improvement – or has made significant contributions through effective promotion of statistics and statistical thinking in business and industry. Consideration is given to those who have made innovative contributions in any field of statistics or enabled transformational change in their organizations.
Woodall, whose lecture is titled “Innovation: Deming’s Views, the Role of Statistics, and the Threats to Scientific Publishing,” is a two-time Virginia Tech alumnus who joined the faculty in the Department of Statistics in 2000. His research interests feature statistical quality control and improvement, including all aspects of process monitoring, such as health-related monitoring, prospective public health surveillance, and social network monitoring.
A fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the American Society of Quality (ASQ), Woodall has published over 180 refereed journal articles and is a past editor of the Journal of Quality Technology and editor-elect for Quality Engineering. He has received many honors, including the ASQ Shewhart Medal, the European Network for Business and Industry Box Medal, and the ASQ Statistics Division William G. Hunter Award.
