Statistics Professor Chosen as UA’s SEC Achievement Award Winner

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Southeastern Conference announced that Dr. Subha Chakraborti, professor of statistics and Morrow Faculty Excellence Fellow, is the 2020 SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner for The University of Alabama.

“Dr. Chakraborti is an ideal candidate for this honor, based on his exceptional and distinguished record of scholarship, including groundbreaking research, superb teaching, outstanding mentoring and all-around contributions to his field and to the community at large,” said UA President Stuart R. Bell.

Faculty members from each SEC university are selected for the honor, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey announced. Now in its ninth year, the program honors one individual from each SEC university for their teaching accomplishments, scholarly contributions and discoveries.

During nearly 36 years at UA, Chakraborti made significant and influential contributions in a number of important research areas. His focus is statistical application in a branch of statistics called nonparametric statistics, where decisions are made without referring to a distribution, such as the bell curve. He played a key role in developing the niche area of nonparametric statistical quality control — developing statistical methods for making things better by improving the monitoring of processes.

He has made significant contributions to research areas that include censored/survival data analysis, income distribution analysis, poverty and income inequality, industrial statistics and general statistical inference. He has over 100 refereed publications and two books.

Chakraborti is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a distinct honor in the profession. For his meritorious contributions, he is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He also received a prestigious Fulbright Senior Scholar award, awarded by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, where he worked in South Africa. He has just received his second Fulbright award to work in Brazil.

Last year, he was selected for the Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award, one of the University’s highest honors for a faculty member, awarded to one recipient annually to recognize and promote excellence in research, scholarship and teaching.

There are approximately 14,000 full-time, tenured faculty members in the SEC, and to be eligible for an achievement award the individual must have achieved the rank of full professor; have a record of extraordinary teaching; and have a record of research that is recognized nationally and/or internationally.

Each SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner will receive a $5,000 honorarium from the SEC and will become his or her university’s nominee for the SEC Professor of the Year Award. The SEC Professor of the Year, to be named in April, receives an additional $15,000 honorarium.

The SEC Faculty Achievement Awards and the SEC Professor of the Year Award are both selected by the SEC provosts, and they are two foundational programs designed by the SEC to support and promote the academic endeavors and achievements of its students, faculty and administrators.