Statisticians Appointed Deans at Indiana University, Brigham Young

The Indiana University Board of Trustees recently named David B. Allison dean of the university’s school of public health. Allison heads to Bloomington, Indiana, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where he was the associate dean for research and science at the school of health professions.

While at UAB, he directed the Office of Energetics and the Nutrition Obesity Research Center and led a robust teaching program as director of the Section on Statistical Genetics. There, he also spearheaded the William “Student” Sealy Gosset Endowed Professorship in Biostatistics—the first endowed professorship in the UAB School of Public Health—in addition to three others.

David Allison
David B. Allison

Allison is a fellow of the National Academy of Medicine. In 2006, he received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. In 2008, he was named by Nature as one of 22 scientists with the most grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Allison earned his PhD from Hofstra University in 1990, and then completed two post-doctoral fellowships at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital Center. Allison has been an ASA member since 1991. He begins his new position on August 15.

Also adding to the list of statisticians occupying senior-level college administration positions is Shane Reese, the new dean of the Brigham Young University (BYU) College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He began teaching at BYU’s Department of Statistics in 2001, and previously served as associate department chair and graduate coordinator.

His work has been used in a variety of intriguing fields, including nuclear weapons, solar energy and glacier health in Antarctica and Asia. He consulted for an NFL team and the U.S. Olympic volleyball team and published original research on baseball legend Babe Ruth and NASCAR icon Jeff Gordon.

Reese received the ASA’s Excellence in Statistics in Sports Award in 2010 and was named a fellow in 2013. He also received the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Teaching Award at BYU in 2010.

Shane Reese
Shane Reese

Reese earned a PhD in statistics from Texas A&M University and both his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in statistics from BYU.