Every two years the International Prize in Statistics is given out to recognize an individual or team for major contributions to the field of statistics particularly those that have practical applications or which lead to breakthroughs in other disciplines. The winner is chosen in a collaboration between the American Statistical Association, the Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, the International Biometric Society, the International Statistical Institute, and the Royal Statistical Society. The 2021 honoree is Nan Laird and her award and career is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories.

Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard University. During her more than forty years on the faculty, she developed many simple and practical statistical methods for pressing public health and medical problems. Her work on the EM Algorithm, with Art Dempster and Don Rubin, is among the top 100 most cited of all published articles in science. She’s also developed popular and widely used methods for meta-analysis, longitudinal data, and statistical genetics. She has worked in several areas of application including the quantification of adverse events in hospitals, childhood obesity, and genetic studies in Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar disorder, asthma, and lung disease. Laird was awarded the 2021 International Prize in Statistics for, "her work on powerful methods that have made possible the analysis of complex longitudinal studies."