The Wilks Memorial Award honors the memory and distinguished career of Sam Wilks by recognizing outstanding contributions to statistics that carry on the spirit of his work. The Wilks Award is made possible in part by a donation from Alexander Mood, who was a student of Wilks. The 2015 honoree is James O. Berger of Duke University. Jim Berger has made fundamental contributions to the foundations of statistics and to statistical decision theory. He is one of the world’s leading figures in Bayesian statistics, particularly in objective Bayes thinking. Berger has made seminal contributions to the areas of model selection, multiple inference, computer modeling and simulation. Now he is a leader in the area of uncertainty quantification, having co-founded the journal in this field. Berger also has made important interdisciplinary contributions, in particular to astronomy, geophysics and medicine.
