VT College of Science Quarterly August 2014 Vol. 1 No. 1 | Page 3

Professor
earns first
annual Soren
Bisgaard
Award
Bill Woodall, Professor of Statistics has been
selected as co-recipient of the first annual
Soren Bisgaard Award which recognizes the
paper in the American Society for Quality
journal, Quality Engineering, with the greatest
potential for advancing the practice of quality
improvement.
Receiving the award with Woodall is the
late George E.P. Box, the world-renowned
statistician who co-wrote the paper “Innovation, Quality Engineering, and Statistics”
with Woodall. It was the last paper written
by Box, who has his own namesake award,
the Box Medal. The Box Medal is awarded to
an extraordinary statistician who has made

John McCormick

Bill Woodall, Professor of Statistics, earned the First Annual Soren Bisgaard Award from the American Society for
Quality for a work he co-authored with George E.P. Box. Woodall also earned Box’s namesake prize, the Box Medal,
in 2012.

remarkable contributions to the development
and application of statistical methods in business and industry. Woodall also received the
Box Medal in 2012.
The collaboration on the paper was initiated
by Box who called Woodall asking if he would
be interested in writing a paper on innovation after Woodall’s inquiry as to why Box had
added the word “innovation” to the title of his
seminal book on designed experimentation.

“Our collaboration will remain the highlight
of my career,” said Woodall. “I found that
Professor Box remained exceptionally bright
at age 92. It is unfortunate he passed away
before the award was announced, because he
and Soren Bisgaard were close colleagues and
friends.”
Woodall received his masters and doctoral
degrees in statistics from Virginia Tech in 1976
and 1980 respectively.

International Conference

Chun Chen, left, of Zhenjiang, China,
a graduate of the Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology
Program, talks with post doctoral fellow Jignesh Parmar of Visnagar, India
during a poster session as part of the
First International Conference on Computational Cell Biology held at Virginia
Tech Aug. 14-16. Both are members of
the Tyson Lab of Computational Cell
Biology.
The conference included more than
100 of the field’s leading scientists representing some of the world’s foremost
universities. Attendees highlighted
the interplay between cutting-edge
biomathematical approaches and
experimental techniques to biological
problems to identify future directions
for the field of computational cell
biology.

august 2013

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