Dennis Lin, professor of statistics at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the title of Distinguished Professor of Statistics. Lin was honored with the title in recognition of his exceptional record of teaching, research, and service to the University community. The honor is designated by the Office of the President of Penn State based on the recommendations of colleagues and the dean of the Eberly College of Science.
Lin's research focuses on statistical methodologies related to business, industry, and government. In particular, much of his work has been in the area of data mining; experimental design; quality assurance, including the quality-assurance method Six Sigma; statistical process control; reliability; and response-surface methodology -- a statistical technique for examining the relationships between "explanatory" and "response" variables and subsequently optimizing the response variables. Lin also uses supersaturated design, which allows him to investigate many variables using a relatively small number of experimental runs. To do his work, Lin makes use of statistical tools such as statistical modeling, number theory, Bayesian inference, optimal-design theory, optimization, and time-series analysis. He currently is working on problems related to dimensional analysis, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and Internet search engines.
Lin was honored as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2013, a Fellow of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) in 2006, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute in 1995, and a Fellow of The Royal Statistical Society in 1988. He was honored with the Don Owen Award from the American Statistical Association in 2011 and the Shewell Award from the ASQ in 2010. Lin has presented several distinguished lectures, including both the 2010 Youden Address for the ASQ and the 2011 Loutit Address for the Statistical Society of Canada. He received the Mercator Visiting Professorship Award from the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) program and was named the Chang-Jiang Scholar at the Remin University of China by the Chinese government's Department of Education in 2008. He was honored with a Faculty Scholar Medal from Penn State in 2004.
Lin is the author of nearly 200 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and of several book chapters. He holds two patents, and he has presented talks at numerous conferences worldwide. He has served as a co-editor of the journal Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry and as an associate editor of various top-ranked journals, including Technometrics, Statistica Sinica, Journal of Quality Technology, Journal of Data Science, and Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice. Lin holds honorary positions at research institutions including the National Chengchi University and the National Sun Yet-Sen University in Taiwan and Fudan University, the XiAn Statistical Institute, and Renmin University in China.
Before joining the faculty at Penn State in 1995, Lin served as a faculty member at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Lin received a doctoral degree in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988 and a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan in 1981.