Email this pageTwo Statisticians Honored at Rochester Commencement
Professor W. Jackson Hall and former student Siddhartha Dalal were among four honorees at the Doctoral Degrees Commencement Ceremony at the University of Rochester on May 15, 2004. Hall was given the University Award for Lifetime Achievement in Graduate Education. He was cited for his 35 years of mentoring graduate students in statistics at the University. Each of Hall's PhD recipients over the years, as well as his post-docs and other mentored graduate students, had written in support of his nomination for this award. Dalal, who earned MBA (1973) and PhD (1975) degrees at the University and is now a Vice President at Xerox Corporation, was one of two recipients of the Rochester Distinguished Scholar Award. He was cited for his accomplishments in research and in research administration.
Jack Hall currently holds a part-time appointment in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, devoting time to continuing research and graduate teaching and serving as statistician for a series of clinical trials in cardiology.
Sid Dalal was in the first group of graduate students in statistics at Rochester and Hall's first PhD student here. His career began at Rutgers University, followed by service at the Mathematics Research Center at Bell Labs, then research and administration at Bell Core/Telcordia. He moved to the Rochester area last year, to direct research at Xerox Corporation sites throughout the US. He has published more than 70 research papers in statistics and computer software engineering and supervised research at Telcordia and now at Xerox. In addition, he provided assistance to the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, on statistical evaluation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and on software engineering and testing needs for the Department of Defense.
Upon receiving his award from UR President Tom Jackson, Hall quipped: "I am anxiously awaiting a campus building to be named after you, Mr. President; 'Jackson Hall' has a nice ring to it, don't you think?"
