Wayne Nelson
Doctor of Sci.
DR. WAYNE NELSON is a leading
expert on reliability data analysis and statistical methods for
accelerated testing. He has privately consulted throughout Industry on
hundreds of diverse engineering and scientific applications of
Statistics. His applications include reliability data analysis,
accelerated testing, quality control, measurement error analysis,
planned experiments, sampling, and data analysis. He develops and
presents Reliability and Statistics courses for companies, universities,
and professional societies. He develops new statistical methods and
computer programs. He also works as an expert witness. An employee of
General Electric Corp. Research & Development for 25 years, he consulted
across the company. As an adjunct professor at Union College and
Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., he taught graduate courses on theory and
application of Statistics.
He was born in Chicago in
1936. He received a B.S. in 1958 in Physics from Caltech, an M.S. in
Physics (NSF Fellow) in 1959, and a Ph.D. in Statistics (NSF Fellow) in
1965, both from the Univ. of Illinois.
He has authored over 120
literature publications on statistical methods, mostly for engineering
applications. For outstanding publications, he was awarded the 1969
Brumbaugh Award, the 1970 Youden Prize, and the 1972 Wilcoxon Prize, all
of the Amer. Soc. for Quality. The Amer. Statistical Assoc. elected him
a Fellow in 1973 for contributions to reliability data analysis. He was
elected to the ASA Council 1975-6, when he established and chaired the
ASA Comm. on Presentation Awards (1976-9). The ASA has awarded him nine
Outstanding Presentation Awards for papers presented at the national
Joint Statistical Meetings. In 1981 General Electric Corp. Research &
Development presented him the Dushman Award for outstanding developments
and applications of statistical methods for product reliability and
accelerated test data. He received GE Corp. R&D Publications Awards in
1981 (100+) and 1985 (125+). The Amer. Soc. for Quality elected him a
Fellow in 1983 for his innovative statistical methodologies. In 1988,
the Inst. for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) elected him a
Fellow for his contributions to reliability and accelerated test data
analysis and to reliability education, a rare honor for a statistician.
He was awarded the first NIST/ASA/NSF
Senior Research Fellowship at the National Inst. of Standards and
Technology (former National Bureau of Standards) to collaborate on
statistical modeling of electromigration failure of microelectronics.
This fellowship was funded by the National Science Foundation and
administered by the Amer. Statistical Assoc.
In 2001 he was awarded a
Fulbright Award for research and lecturing (in Spanish) on reliability
data analysis for the School of Engineering of the Universidad de Buenos
Aires, Argentina's leading engineering university, and for local
engineering and statistical societies. Since then he has annually given
a series of seminars for the School of Engineering of the Univ. de
Buenos Aires.
In 2004, the Amer. Soc. for
Quality awarded him the Shewhart Medal for his technical leadership, in
particular for innovative developments and applications of theory and
methods for analyzing quality, reliability, and accelerated test data,
and for widely disseminating such developments through his books and
many publications, talks, and courses.
In 2005 the Reliability
Society of the IEEE presented him the Lifetime Achievement Award, the
Society's most prestigious honor. He was the second person ever to
receive this award. It recognizes his developments of methods for
analyzing reliability and accelerated test data and his many
contributions to reliability education through his books, articles, and
courses.
Dr. Nelson authored the book
Applied Life Data Analysis, published by Wiley in 1982 and translated
into Japanese in 1988 by the Japanese Union of Scientists and
Engineers. The ASA invited him to present this book in the only short
course at the 1982 national meeting. In 1990, Wiley published his book
Accelerated Testing: Statistical Models, Test Plans, and Data Analyses,
which he presented as an invited short course at the ASA 1990 national
meeting and many in-house and public courses.. He authored the ASA-SIAM
(2003) book Recurrent Events Data Analysis for Product Repairs, Disease
Recurrences, and Other Applications. He presented invited short
courses from it at the 2002 and 2004 Joint Statistical Meetings, the
2002 Deming Conference, and the 2006 Foro of the Mexican Statistical
Assoc. (in Spanish). He has authored eight book chapters, two Amer.
Soc. for Quality tutorial booklets (translated into Italian), and
contributed to four technical standards of engineering societies.
He can be reached at
WNconsult@aol.com.
More details of his career,
publications, and many applications appear at
www.members.aol.com/WNconsult .
