Christine M. Anderson-Cook to speak in inaugural Douglas C. Montgomery Distinguished Lecture
Christine M. Anderson-Cook, a recently retired research scientist in the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, will kick off the Douglas C. Montgomery Distinguished Lecture Series on Sept. 20.
While at Los Alamos, Anderson-Cook contributed to more than 80 projects and led projects in a wide range of areas, including nuclear nonproliferation, sequential design of experiments for carbon capture, cybersecurity, complex system reliability, and using data competitions to advance algorithms for detecting radioactive materials.
The focus of Anderson-Cook’s discussion is the relevance of designed data collection in the era of big data. She will present several scenarios highlighting how strategic data collection using designed experiments can guide the choice of big data. She will also demonstrate how new methods and innovative uses of existing designed experiments have facilitated better solutions to complex problems.
“The new era of big data challenges us to adapt our methodologies to better meet project needs with our data while carefully managing limited resources,” said Anderson-Cook, who was a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech from 1996-2004.
This event will take place Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 3:30 p.m. in the Fralin Hall Auditorium and virtually via Zoom webinar. It is free and open to the public; to register, visit aimsbbis.vt.edu/MontgomeryLecture2022.
Anderson-Cook’s discussion launches the Douglas C. Montgomery Distinguished Lecture Series, a collaborative effort between the Department of Statistics in the College of Science and the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the College of Engineering.
Generously supported by three-time Hokie Douglas C. Montgomery, a renowned expert in statistical quality engineering, this interdisciplinary series of talks serves as a forum for current topics in industrial statistics and statistical engineering.
Crediting both the Department of Statistics and Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering for enabling him to have a productive and successful career, Montgomery is excited about the collaboration between the two departments.
“I hope that the two departments will bring in well-recognized scholars and other authorities who have a track record of ‘working across the aisle’ — to quote a common contemporary phrase — between industrial engineering, other engineering disciplines, and statistics, showing the synergy between the disciplines,” said Montgomery. “I hope this will encourage others, students and faculty alike, to make more efforts in this direction.”
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