Program: Professor Arthur Dempster will formally retire on June 30, 2005. He expects to continue as Research Professor following 47 years on the active teaching faculty of the Harvard Statistics Department. To mark the occasion Professor Dempster has invited five distinguished statistical scientists to present aspects of their own research in a day-long session aimed at exposing students and professionals to outstanding projects that represent important forward-looking areas for the development of the discipline. Two of the speakers are former PhD advisees of Professor Dempster (Augustine Kong and Nanny Wermuth), one is a former junior faculty member (Victor Solo), and two are admired colleagues (Mark Berliner and Robert Tibshirani).

Augie Kong will summarize and reflect on a trilogy of recent papers in Nature Genetics of which he is the senior author. Nanny Wermuth will discuss properties and applications of special types of multivariate graphical models that she has taken the lead in developing in collaboration with D. R. Cox. Vic Solo will survey the history and state of the art of statistical signal processing for the analysis of fMRI sequential image data based on his research as a visiting scientist at the leading MRI research center at MGH. Mark Berliner expects to discuss the use of Bayesian methods and models for the study of physical phenomena, while Rob Tibshirani will focus on thoughts and experiences in biomarker validation.