Mary Ellen Bock

Mary Ellen Johnston Bock is a retired American statistician, now a professor emeritus at Purdue University^[1] after becoming the first female full professor of statistics and the first female chair of the department there.^[2] She was president of the American Statistical Association in 2007.^[3]

Mary Ellen Bock
Mary Ellen Johnston Bock
Alma mater	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scientific career
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	Purdue University
Thesis	Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution  (1974)

Education and career

As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Bock earned a bachelor's degree in the German language in 1967.^[1] She switched to mathematics for her graduate studies at the same university, completing her PhD in 1974 under the supervision of Robert B. Ash with a dissertation on Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution.^[1][4][5]

As chair of statistics at Purdue from 1995 to 2010, Bock led the department through a period of growth, and took a multidisciplinary approach to the subject that included computational statistics as well as application areas including biostatistics, statistical finance, and environmental statistics.^[2]

Awards and honors

Bock is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,^[1] and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.^[6] She won the Founders Award of the American Statistical Association in 2013.^[1]