Jones is presented with George Box Medal

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Recently, George Box was remembered and honored at a statistics conference in Florence, Italy. And so was Bradley Jones, a JMP retiree and DOE pioneer. At the conference, Jones was presented the George Box Medal and gave the traditional Box lecture, an annual historic honor dating back to 2003, when the Box Medal was first presented to George Box himself.

The medal recognizes “an extraordinary statistician who has remarkably contributed … to the development and the application of statistical methods in European business and industry.”

“Bradley Jones, with his many collaborators, transformed DOE from a sleepy discipline into a field full of breakthrough discoveries," John Sall observed, marking the occasion. "Why ever use the old fractional factorials now that we have designs with minimal aliasing with respect to higher-order effects? Not only are the modeled effects insulated from possible bias from higher-order unmodeled effects, but, with the effect sparsity principle, it is possible to find big higher-order effects that would not ordinarily be estimable. From our perspective as a software provider, we have heard many dramatic success stories from engineers troubleshooting problems and improving products and processes using these DOE innovations. Brad has been an inspiring leader, both to our own team and to the statistics profession.” 

And Ryan Lekivetz, whom Jones hired 14 years ago and who now leads the DOE and reliability development team at JMP, shares, “One of the most rewarding parts of the ceremony was seeing the audience's reaction. The room was full of researchers and practitioners whose work Brad has influenced, whether through direct interactions, his research, or the innovations he helped bring to JMP. It was a reminder of just how many people, projects, and organizations he has influenced over the years.”

Lekivetz also noted, “Brad’s prominence in both academic research and industrial practice was one reason I joined JMP. Much of his research began with practical problems faced by JMP users or with gaps he recognized in existing methods. Those insights often became capabilities in the software, helping professionals design effective, resource-efficient experiments.”