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ENDOWMENT BRINGS NATIONAL EXPERT TO IOWA STATE'S STATISTICS DEPARTMENT

Administrators in Iowa State’s Department of Statistics say they have been trying to attract Karen Kafadar to Iowa State for years. And Karen Kafadar calls Iowa State a “mecca” for statistical research.
But when a university is trying to signon a professor who is top-notch in herprofession, mutual admiration isn’talways enough.

Kafadar’s decision to come to Iowa State this fall as the Laurence H. Baker Endowed Chair in Biological Statistics was highly influenced by the additional prestige, income, and opportunities that accompany an endowed chair position, say her future colleagues. “If you really want to compete for the best people in the country, you have to offer this type of prestigious position,” said Alicia Carriquiry, Iowa
State professor of statistics and a member of the Baker Chair search committee.

“As a department, we’re extraordinarily grateful to the Baker family for endowing this position,” Carriquiry said. “Kafadar is the fourth woman with full professor
status in this department, a number that places us in the national forefront in senior faculty gender diversity.”

Norma Baker of Los Angeles established the endowment in 1999 as part of a $10 million endowment to the Department of Statistics and the Plant Sciences Institute to honor her late husband, Laurence H. Baker, a 1954 genetics graduate of Iowa State and a long-time employee of Pioneer Hi-Bred
International. The chair leads collaborative research in the biological or agricultural sciences. “We are very pleased with this significant appointment. It will surely enhance and stimulate further interest in the department’s development,” Baker said.

Kafadar said that she finds the interdisciplinary nature of the position particularly appealing. “I’m excited about working with agriculture more than I
have in the past. Whenever you work with a new discipline, you find methods that can be translated to problems in other areas.”

For example, to the layperson, designing test equipment for microwaves and trying to decide how often to screen for cancer may seem unrelated. But when Kafadar left her position as mathematical
statistician at Hewlett Packard Company for a new job as fellow at the National Cancer Institute, she found new uses for past research. From the NCI, she went on to the University of Colorado-Denver,
as professor of mathematics and chancellor’s
scholar.

Kafadar received her B.S in mathematics and M.S. in statistics from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in statistics from Princeton University. Her dissertation
research was in an area that – while more commonplace now – was avant garde at the time, she said. “We have massive amounts of data in every area, and transfer of information affects everything
we do. But how do we sort out what variables are important? Which are the ones that the human brain can assimilate, and what should the computer
do? What data do we pass on to individuals to make judgments?

“My dissertation research concerned finding ways to look at interesting patterns in data without deciding in advance what you were looking for,” said Kafadar. “Having no formal statistical modeling and no a priori model was quite rebellious at the time.”

As she describes her research, Kafadar often reveals the cross-disciplinary nature of her work. For example, she compares two research questions: “How often should women be screened for breast cancer?” and “How often should airplane passengers undergo safety screening?” The questions are related, she explains, because they both include biases that
involve time periods. The longer people are at an airport, the greater their chances of undergoing multiple screenings. Similarly, because breast cancer is so slow growing, women are more likely to
undergo multiple screenings, as doctors search for its presence over many years. But at what point are more screeningsnot only unhelpful, but also harmful?
“It’s not as straightforward as it sounds,” she said. “It’s an important problem thataffects many people.”

In addition to her research at Iowa State, Kafadar will teach a graduate-level course on exploratory data analysis and plans to write a textbook in this area. “The enrollment in her class is already
high. The students are excited about her being here,” said Carriquiry.

“We’re truly delighted to have Dr. Kafadar join our faculty,” said Michael Whiteford, dean of the College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “She will be an excellent addition to an already outstanding group of statisticians, and we look forward to the synergies that her presence will generate.”

About the Writer | Karol Crosbie is a freelance writer for the ISU Foundation.