Memorial Session for David L. Wallace

• Activity Number: 259 - David Wallace Memorial Session
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 : 1:00 PM to 2:50 PM
• Sponsor: Memorial
• Author(s): Steven J. Skates* and Wing Hung Wong* and Donald Rubin* and Peter McCullagh* and Theodore Karrison*
• Companies: MGH & HMS and Stanford University and Tsinghua University and University of Chicago
• Keywords: Memorial; Marker words; Authorship; Bayesian Analysis; Dedicated Teacher

Abstract

For over 40 years David Wallace was a faculty member of the Department of Statistics University of Chicago. He is most well-known for his work with Frederick Mosteller – The Federalist, where Madison, Hamilton, and Jay claimed authorship on all but 12 of 85 Federalist papers. Their analysis, the first large scale applied Bayesian study, identified Madison as the author of all 12. To his students and fellow faculty however, David Wallace was better known as a statistician of breadth and depth equaled by few, yet humble, gracious, and generous. Don Rubin will speak on David Wallace as THE heart of the department, in a way that supported all the other members. Peter McCullagh will speak on Wallace's ideas on applied statistics for the graduate sequence, and then focus on recent work on response transformation in linear regression. Ted Karrison will talk about David’s role as teacher and his thoughtful guidance during his dissertation on restricted mean survival time with covariates, and then present related recent work. Steven Skates will present David Wallace’s dedication as a thesis advisor, and the Federalist Papers’ inspiration for early detection cancer biomarker discovery.