Lu Tian

Candidate for President-Elect

Statement

It is an exacting time to be a statistician today and especially one at Bay-area because of the intellectual density and career development opportunities. It is really my honor to be a candidate in the upcoming election for serving the Bay Area Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA).

I have moved to Stanford University four years ago. Although relatively new to the area, I have been involved in a wide variety of activities of ASA, where I exchange ideas, make friends, work with colleagues and simply have wonderful time. I have benefited a lot from those activities myself and truly appreciate the importance of an energetic local chapter to someone who is still junior in the career path.

If elected, as the President Elected of the Bay Area Chapter, I will work with members, current and past officials of the chapter to identify and focus on important areas, which can benefit our profession the most. For now, I am thinking about the following items:

1. Work with members of the chapter to continue our excellent traditional seminar series including inviting speakers from both industry and academia, attracting more audience (especially juniors) and facilitating the discussion and potential collaboration during and after the seminars.

2. Organize new and continue a variety of activities to publicize the importance of our profession to society. For example, improve the chapter website to attract more traffic; enhance the current statistics workshop for bay area AP statistics teachers and volunteer statistician visits to local classrooms for attracting talented high school students to statistics.

3. Maintain the Chapter’s tradition to support the students, the new blood of our profession, via offering the travel awards to JSM. We may want to consider more effective means to increase the publicity of competition and attract more participation from qualified graduate students.

As you probably recognized, our Chapter already has many excellent programs. They are, in my opinion, very good starting points to continue and improve our service Chapter members. Although I am relatively junior and inexperienced, I would really welcome this invaluable opportunity to serve our chapter. I would be attentive to the diverse needs of our members, open to new ideas, devote my time to learn and work closely with experienced officials to realize those good ideas, and enjoy serving our statistical community. Thank you for your considerations.

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