Special Issue: Memorial Issue for Professor Tze L. Lai

The international statistics community mourns the loss of Professor Tze Leung Lai, an eminent figure in statistics, finance, and biomedical data science. Professor Lai, the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor and former chair of the Department of Statistics, Stanford University, was a distinguished scholar, global leader, and exemplary educator. His profound contributions spanned statistical theory, applications, and education. He made many pioneering advances in sequential analysis, including developing a comprehensive theory for sequential tests of composite hypotheses, addressing practical complexities in changepoint detection for quality control and making important advances in group sequential methods for designing and analyzing clinical trials. Additionally, he made significant advancements in areas such as the multi-armed bandit problem, stochastic approximation and recursive estimation, adaptive control of linear stochastic systems and Markov decision processes, saddle point approximations and boundary-crossing probabilities in Markov random walks and random fields, survival analysis, inference for hidden Markov models, financial statistics and probability theory.

Professor Lai’s impact extended beyond research; he mentored 79 PhD students, numerous post-doctoral fellows, and visiting scholars worldwide. As a dedicated member of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA), he provided invaluable guidance and support to many in their professional journeys.

In celebration of Professor Lai’s remarkable life and his enduring legacy, the ICSA annouces a special issue in the “Statistics in Biosciences” dedicated to his memory. We invite submissions from researchers to contribute to this tribute. The deadline for submission is June 30, 2024.

View the Memorial Issue for Professor Tze L. Lai flyer.