The 2025 Rao Prize Conference held by The Penn State Department of Statistics

The Penn State Department of Statistics held the 2025 Rao Prize Conference on May 20, 2025, to honor three prize recipients: the 2025 C. R. and Bhargavi Rao Prize Recipient Trevor Hastie, the John A. Overdeck Professor of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University; the 2025 P. R. Krishnaiah Lecturer Martin Wainwright, the Cecil H. Green Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the 2025 C. G. Khatri Lecturer Hui Zou, the Dr. Lynn Y. S. Lin Professor of Statistics at the University of Minnesota. There were about 100 researchers attending this conference.

The conference program consisted of three plenary speakers, four invited speakers, and a poster presentation by postdocs and graduate students. The plenary speakers were Hastie, Wainwright, and Zou. The invited speakers were Associate Professor of Statistics Will Fithian of the University of California, Berkeley, Assistant Professor of Data Sciences and Operations Zijun Gao of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, Professor of Statistics and Computer Science Jia Li of Penn State, and Professor of Computer Science Pradeep Ravikumar of Carnegie Mellon University.

One of the highlights of the conference was the awarding of the 2025 Rao Prize to Trevor Hastie. Hastie is known for his research in the fields of statistical modeling, statistical computing, bioinformatics, and statistical learning. He has published six books and over 200 research articles in these areas. Hastie is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, the Royal Statistical Society, and the South African Statistical Society. In 2018, Hastie was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2019, he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a recipient of the Founders of Statistics Prize for Contemporary Research Contributions, the Leo Breiman Award (Senior), the Wald Memorial Award, and the Technometrics Ziegel Award. During the period 2006–2009, he was the chair of the Department of Statistics at Stanford University. He has also made contributions in statistical computing, co-editing (with J. Chambers) a large software library on modeling tools in the S language ("Statistical Models in S", Wadsworth, 1992), which forms the foundation for much of the statistical modeling in R. He has received honorary doctoral degrees from University of Waterloo, Canada, and Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany.

This conference also highlighted the 2025 P. R. Krishnaiah Lecturer, Martin Wainwright, and the 2025 C. G. Khatri Lecturer, Hui Zou. Wainwright is the 2014 winner of the COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Joint Statistical Societies; he is an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow; he has won best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the IEEE Communications Society, and the IEEE Information Theory and Communication Societies; and he has received the Medallion Lectureship and Blackwell Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the NSF CAREER Award. Zou is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the Founders of Statistics Prize for Contemporary Research Contributions, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Tweedie Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

The C. R. and Bhargavi Rao Prize was established to honor and recognize outstanding and influential innovations in the theory and practice of mathematical statistics, international leadership in directing statistics research, and pioneering contributions by a recognized leader in the field of statistics. The C. G. Khatri Memorial Lectureship and P. R. Krishnaiah Memorial Lectureship honor the memory of C. G. Khatri and P. R. Krishnaiah by inviting outstanding researchers in statistics to deliver lectures at Penn State. More details about the conference can be found on the web at https://science.psu.edu/stat/2025-rao-prize-conference.

Statistics Department Head Nicole Lazar and Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Tracy Langkilde presenting the 2025 C.R. and Bhargavi Rao Prize to Trevor Hastie