1 April 2011
TO:
FIONA M. DOYLE
CHAIR, BERKELEY DIVISION, ACADEMIC SENATE
FROM: BARRY STROUD
CHAIR, FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURE COMMITTEE
RE:
NOMINATIONS OF FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURERS FOR 2011-2012
The Faculty Research Lecture Committee considered all this year’s
nominations in its meeting 30 March 2011 and unanimously recommends that
the Faculty Research Lectures in 2011-12 be delivered by Professor Terry
Speed of the Department of Statistics and Professor Jan de Vries of the
Department of History.
Professor Terry Speed is a pioneer in the development and application of
statistical methods for the analysis of biomedical and genomic data. His
involvement in this work goes back to the 1980s, predating by more than a
decade the flood of statisticians who by now have been attracted to this
field. His work comes out of a genuine interest in biology and medicine.
He has written seminal papers on the statistical analysis of meiosis, a
type of cell division fundamental in sexual reproduction and in the
formation of gametes. He has made key contributions to DNA sequencing,
genome annotation, and the genetic mapping of complex traits in both human
and animal organisms. His most recent and best-known contributions concern
the analysis of genomic data from high-throughout microarray and sequencing
arrays. This can be thought of as a miniature laboratory on a chip that
can provide in a single experiment a detailed snapshot of the thousands of
genes and proteins interacting in any organism, whether bacterium or human.
It can be used, for instance, to monitor gene expression patterns in cells
from cancer patients, with the aim of deriving better diagnosis and
treatment strategies for the disease. Professor Speed and his
collaborators have developed new methods of solving key practical issues in
micorarray data analysis, from the so-called low-level analysis of “raw”
image files to higher-level analyses connecting biological and clinical
outcomes to thousands of gene-expression measures. These methods have
become standard in the biologist’s toolbox and have been widely used in
proprietary as well as open-source software.
Although Professor Speed is perhaps best known today for his work in
applied statistics, he has made significant contributions to theoretical
statistics and probability, including coding theory, experimental design,
graphical models, and sufficiency. He is an enthusiastic and energetic
teacher and an inspiring and generous mentor who has influenced generations
of outstanding Berkeley students. He was awarded the Pitman Medal of the
Statistical Society of Australia in 2002, the Moyal Medal of Macquarrie
University in 2003, was joint recipient of the Outstanding Statistical
Application Award of the American Statistical Association in 2004, and
received the NHMRC Achievement Award for Excellence in Health and Medical
Research in 2007.
Professor Jan de Vries is regarded as one of the three top economic
historians specializing in European economic history active in the world
today. His contributions span almost all aspects of the field of economic
history: the economic history of the Dutch Netherlands, studies in the
history of trans-oceanic economic activity, the origins of the industrial
revolution, historical transformations in the sexual division of labor and
the emergence of consumer society, and the history and dynamics of
urbanization. His massive account of the Dutch economy is the definitive
treatment of the rise and fall of the world’s first commercial society. He
offers in detail the best answer we have to the long-standing puzzle of how
the manifest explosion of goods and consumer buying power in the eighteenth
century was possible in the absence of commensurate gains in productivity.
Professor de Vries finds the solution in people’s working harder and
mobilizing family labor, and he explains how this happened. This was a new
departure in economic history. It shifts the attention of economic
historians from a production-centered model of industrialization focussed
on technological innovation, the organization of labor, and the wages of
workers, to a consumption-driven model of economic modernization focussed
instead on the rise of markets, urbanization, state centralization,
consumer desires, and the participation of women and children in the
production of market economies. Its subjects range from mundane matters of
cooking, cleaning, and child-raising to more general questions of market
culture, social learning and networking, to the difference between
housework and formal employment and the connection between the industrial
revolution and modern growth. Professor de Vries’ term ‘the industrious
revolution’ has by now entered the common language of historians and
economists.
Professor de Vries is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, both the
Flemish and Walloon Belgium Academies, and the Royal Netherlands Academy.
He has been President of the Economic History Association and in 2000 was
awarded the A. H. Heineken Prize for History by the Royal Netherlands
Academy.