2008 Statistical Conference in Honor of Bob Shumway's Retirement and Life's Work

We are honored to hold this conference to recognize and celebrate the distinguished career of our friend, teacher, mentor, collaborator, and colleague Robert Shumway. Our conference will take place on the campus of the University of California, Davis, where Professor Shumway has served as Professor of Statistics since 1980. It will be held June 26-27, immediately following the 2007 joint meetings of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society (WNAR) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The joint WNAR/IMS meetings will also be held in Davis from June 22-25.

Dr. Shumway, or "Bob" as he is affectionately known to all, has been a leading researcher in time series analysis since he began his academic career over 40 years ago. In 1965, he received his Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics from the George Washington University under the direction of Solomon Kullback. His thesis was entitled An Information Theoretic Approach to the Problem of Discriminating between Two Stochastic Processes. Bob's doctoral research foreshadowed his influential work on time series discrimination and classification, an area in which he has made many seminal contributions. In 1966-- merely a year after receiving his Ph.D.-- Bob was hired as an associate professor by his alma mater. He was promoted six years later to full professor. He continued to work at George Washington until 1980, when he and his family moved to California and he began his career at UC Davis.

Bob has published over 80 scholarly articles. His body of work has had a profound influence on the development of time series analysis, and includes substantive contributions to many of its important domains, such as state-space modeling, spectral analysis, deconvolution, model selection, discrimination and classification, and seismology. He has received extensive funding for his interdisciplinary research, highlighted by continual support from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Department of Defense. He is the co-author of the widely used time series text Time Series Analysis and Its Applications (Second Edition) (2006, Springer), which he wrote with David Stoffer, one of his many doctoral advisees. He is also the author of a respected earlier text, Applied Statistical Time Series Analysis (1988, Prentice Hall).

Bob has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the 1986 American Statistical Association Award for Outstanding Statistical Application and the 1982 Communicable Diseases Center Statistics Award, each for joint papers on time series applications. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served on editorial boards for the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Forecasting, Statistical Modelling: An International Journal, and Water Resources Research.

In addition to his many notable achievements as a researcher, Bob has also been an outstanding teacher and mentor. As an instructor, his ability to communicate highly technical material, coupled with a natural rapport with his classes, has had an indelible impact on countless students. He has supervised 31 doctoral advisees, many of whom will be in attendance at this conference. The thesis problems he has directed are as varied and diverse as the students who have researched these problems. Bob is enthusiastic about Statistics, and his enthusiasm is contagious. As both a teacher and an advisor, he has fostered an understanding and a respect for the scientific process, as well as an appreciation for the excitement of discovery.

Bob continues to reside in Davis with his wife Ruth. He has remained active as a time series researcher, yet also enjoys travelling, golf, and spending time with his children and grandchildren. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to honor Bob for his lifetime of accomplishments, and to thank him for the positive influence he has had on our lives, both personally and professionally.