UA’s Hardin Elected Fellow of American Statistical Association

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. J. Michael Hardin, senior associate dean and professor of statistics at The University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Commerce, has been elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

The distinctive designation of fellow is reserved for professionals in statistics who make outstanding contributions to the field. American Statistical Association members work in government, industry and academia applying statistics in medical, biological, physical, economic and social sciences.

The fellow designation is limited to no more than one-third of 1 percent of the ASA membership, which now is about 18,000 in the United States, Canada and overseas.

Hardin is the second UA professor of statistics to be named a fellow of the ASA in the past three years, and he is the fifth Culverhouse faculty member to receive the designation.

The others are Drs. Subhabrata Chakraborti, Jean Gibbons, Badrig Kurkjian and William Woodall.

Hardin received a bachelor’s degree from the University of West Florida, a master’s degree from Florida State University, a master’s degree and a doctorate from The University of Alabama and a Master of Divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

“Dr. Hardin is a widely known researcher,” said Dr. J. Barry Mason, dean of the Culverhouse College of Commerce. “Statistics will play an ever-increasing role in American society and business.

“Dr. Hardin has played a lead role in establishing The University of Alabama as a point of reference in the burgeoning field of business analytics and data mining, both of which allow intelligent business decisions to be made,” Mason said. “To achieve the designation of fellow in this important discipline is a great accomplishment, and Dr. Hardin is to be congratulated.”

Hardin specializes in business analytics, business intelligence, data mining and knowledge discovery, decision support, predictive modeling and research design.

Hardin has authored or co-authored more than 85 papers in various journals including the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the American Journal of Epidemiology, the American Statistician, the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, and Communications in Statistics.

He is the author or co-author of more than 200 abstracts presented at national meetings and has given more than 85 invited lectures or talks. He is the author of several book chapters dealing with database design and decision support systems.

Hardin often serves as a consultant to healthcare organizations in the areas of data mining, sampling and program integrity. Additionally, he is an instructor and consultant for the SAS Institute in the areas of data mining and time series analysis.

He is adjunct professor of biostatistics and adjunct professor of health informatics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has served as scholar in residence in the Center for Information Management, department of information systems and operations management, Loyola University, Chicago, and visiting professor in the department of management and information sciences and statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

He is a member of numerous professional associations including the American Statistical Association, the Biometric Society and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

The American Statistical Association was founded in Boston in 1839 and counts among its members Florence Nightingale, Alexander Graham Bell, Herman Hollerith, Andrew Carnegie and Martin Van Buren.

ASA members apply their expertise in a number of areas, including research in medical areas such as AIDS; environmental risk assessment; the development of new therapeutic drugs; the exploration of space; quality assurance in industry; the examination of social issues such as the homeless and the poor; analytic research on current business problems and economic forecasting; the setting of standards for statistics used at all levels of government; the promotion and development of statistical education for the public and the profession and the expansion of methods and the use of computers and graphics to advance the science of statistics.