Fienberg, who has taught at Carnegie Mellon since 1980, is one of the nation's leading experts in statistics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has advised numerous government agencies on statistical matters. He is a past chair of the National Research Council's Committee on National Statistics, and recently chaired the NRC Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph, whose report challenged the scientific validity of lie detector tests.
Fienberg is the co-author of "Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America." He has served as head of the Department of Statistics, as acting director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, and as dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon.
The AAPSS will honor this year's nine fellows Sunday, April 18, in Washington, D.C. Each Fellow is designated to a position named after a distinguished scholar who has written over the past century for the Academy's bimonthly journal, The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science. Fienberg will be designated as the Thorsten Sellin Fellow. The late Thorsten Sellin was a University of Pennsylvania scholar who came to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s for his studies in the use of criminal statistics and helped draft the U.S. Uniform Criminal Statistics Act in 1944.
"Thorsten Sellin was one of AAPSS' most illustrious members and leaders and I am especially pleased to be linked to him in this fashion," Fienberg said. "I share many scholarly interests in criminal justice with him, including cohort studies and the quantitative approaches to the study of deterrence."
The Department of Statistics is one of eight departments in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the second-largest academic unit at Carnegie Mellon. The college emphasizes interdisciplinary study in a technologically rich environment, with an open and forward-thinking stance toward the arts and sciences.