Lincoln, Neb. —Walter W. Stroup, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor in the Department of Statistics at University of Nebraska was the recipient of the 2024 W. J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting presented by the American Statistical Association.
Dr. Stroup has demonstrated excellence in statistical consulting throughout his career, with his impressive accomplishments greatly benefiting both the statistical community and a diverse set of scientific fields. His dedication to statistical consulting and interdisciplinary collaborations, his excellence in developing new tools for statistical practice, his substantial contribution to training the next-generation of statistical consultants, and his commitment to help his colleagues made him an obvious and deserving candidate for the Dixon Award.
Some of Dr. Stroup’s life-long professional accomplishments in the field of statistical consulting that contributed to his award include: 1) A series of books authored by Dr. Stroup in the areas of linear models, mixed models, generalized models that are widely used by statistical practitioners and subject manner scientists worldwide. 2) Dr. Stroup’s collaboration with SAS software developers in statistical modeling to create tools that are accessible and understandable to the scientific community. 3) Activities with the American Statistical Association to train the future generation of statistical consultants and help current consultants improve their skills. 4) Dr. Stroup also developed and delivered numerous courses, short courses and workshops for academia, industry, and government scientists in statistics, agriculture, pharmaceutical, biological and social sciences worldwide. His teaching enabled scientists to apply state-of-the-art techniques in the areas of statistical design and modeling to their various projects. 5) Dr. Stroup’s profound and lasting impact on developing statistical consultants and supporting statistical consultants in academia. His supporting efforts resulted in guidelines published by the American Statistical Association to ensure that universities properly evaluate statistics faculty working in the field of statistical consulting. 6) Dr. Stroup’s interdisciplinary collaborations resulted numerous collaborative research articles in various fields (e.g.: agriculture, horticulture, soil science, entomology, veterinary medicine, food science, microbiology, genetics, wildlife ecology, pharmaceuticals, social sciences, etc.) 7) Several substantive consulting projects conducted by Dr. Stroup. In one of these projects, Dr. Stroup had a crucial role in developing statistical methods for shelf life estimation for the Stability Shelf Life Working Group that is an academia, government and industry partnership sponsored by the Product Quality Research Institute. Another project where Dr. Stroup played a key role was the Nebraska Math project, a $10M NSF initiative in psychology and educational research. The project aimed to improve middle school math teacher training by implementing innovative curricula. Dr. Stroup, serving as a statistical consultant and a co-principal investigator, applied design and analysis techniques to access the program’s effectiveness, working closely with education partners.
Dr. Stroup’s demonstrated excellence, commitment to the advancements of statistical consulting and collaborative research, significant and long lasting-impact on students and colleagues, inspiring attitude still continues as he contributes to UNL’s Statistical Cross-disciplinary Collaboration and Consulting Lab (SC3L)’ mission of providing assistance to students, faculty and staff in their statistical analyses and developing the next generation of statistical consultants at UNL.