[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Balakrishnan.jpg” caption=”Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan, professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics. Photo by Susan Bubak. “]Statistics professor Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan is the 2008 winner of the Don Owen Award for excellence in research and teaching. Presented annually by the San Antonio chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA), the award is named after Don Owen, a distinguished professor of statistics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

“Dr. Balakrishnan is an outstanding example of the ideals expected by this important award and reflects both the research and teaching excellence within the Faculty of Science here at McMaster,” said John Capone, dean of the Faculty of Science, “and in the spirit of this kind of distinction, Dr. Balakrishnan will be held high as a role model.”

Balakrishnan has been part of the McMaster research community since the mid 1980s. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a member of various statistical institutes and associations, and has been a visiting professor at universities around the world. He also holds editorial positions at numerous statistical journals and has supervised 46 master's students and 24 PhD students.

Balakrishnan's research interests include order statistics, outliers, distribution theory, statistical inference, records, multivariate analysis, reliability, survival analysis and industrial statistics.

“For example, order statistics arise naturally in many problems, such as life-testing and reliability experiments, outlier detection, robust inference and my work in this area covers both theoretical problems, like bounds, approximations, recurrence relations and characterizations, as well as applied aspects, like inference, acceptance sampling, tolerance limits and prediction,” he explained.

Balakrishnan uses an example that we are all familiar with this winter — snowfall.

“For instance, very few people are aware that during the last 135 years, there has been a green Christmas for almost half of those years, and yet we tend to perceive what our most recent experience is.”

Balakrishnan will be presented with the Don Own award on Friday, March 28 in San Antonio, Texas.