The CRM and SSC jointly sponsor this prestigious award. It is given annually to a Canadian statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the discipline in the recipient's first 15 years after earning a doctorate. Wasserman, born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, is the fourth recipient of the prize.
Wasserman has authored or co-authored more than 60 scientific articles. He is considered a leader for his perspective on and knowledge of the foundations of statistics. His expertise and influence have impacted modern statistical theory, such as sampling, mixture models, multiple testing, goodness-of-fit and robustness issues. He also collaborates with astrophysicists and statistical geneticists.
Wasserman's contributions to statistical theory and his work as a pioneer in Bayesian inference have won him many distinctions over the past two decades in the United States and Canada. At the conclusion of his doctorate studies in 1988, he won the SSC's Pierre Robillard Award for the best thesis in probability or statistics. In 1996, he was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 1999, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies selected him for the Presidents' Award for being an outstanding researcher under the age of 40.
The CRM-SSC prize was awarded at the annual meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada on May 26-29 in Hamilton, Ontario.