We’re deeply saddened to announce the passing of Don Ylvisaker. Don was instrumental in establishing the Department of Statistics and was a great friend, mentor, and colleague to many of us. We are preparing a special In Memoriam page as well as a full obituary to honor Don’s lasting contributions to our community, which we hope to share with you very soon.

Don is preceded in death by his son Peter, and sisters Mary and Sylvia. He is survived by his wife Anna (Ricci), sisters Elisabeth and Shirley, as well as many nieces, nephews and cousins.

The family would like donations in Don’s memory to be made to VNA Health at 509 E. Montecito Street, Suite 200, Santa Barbara, CA 93103.

More details are available here.

Dr. Jingyi Jessica Li has been promoted to Full Professor, effective July 1, 2022.

Dr. Li has joint appointments in the Departments of Statistics, Biostatistics, Computational Medicine, and Human Genetics. Her research focuses on developing rigorous, robust, interpretable, and efficient statistical methods to address important questions in biomedical sciences, especially those around high-throughput genomic studies. The significance of her work’s impact is evident from her success in developing widely-used bioinformatics tools to advance transcriptomics studies at tissue and single-cell levels, and publications in influential journals such as Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, Nature Communications, Science Advances, and Genome Biology. Dr. Li’s talent and achievements have been recognized with multiple awards, including an NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Math Scholar Award from the Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Program, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 China, and Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship.

Please congratulate Jessica for her promotion!

Statistica Sinica featured their latest special issue on sliced inverse regression (SIR) to honor Ker-Chau Li for his ground-breaking contributions to dimension-reduction techniques in high-dimensional statistics. Over his career Professor Li also made substantial contributions in mathematics / computational statistics, high-dimensional data analysis, bioinformatics, systems biology, and applied research. Li served as a Co-editor of Statistica Sinica, 1999-2002, and as the Director of the Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, 2006-2012. He was elected as Academician of Academia Sinica in 2012, and subsequently as a member to the World Academy of Sciences in 2014. He was also the founder of the Mathematics in Biology Lab at the Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica. The special issue is available here.

Please congratulate Kerchau when you next see him.