Sally C. MortonThe University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health honors Sally C. Morton, dean of the Virginia Tech College of Science and a professor of statistics, with its 16th Annual Janet L. Norwood Award.
Given by the UAB Department of Biostatistics, the award recognizes outstanding career achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences. Morton will be honored at a dinner on Sept. 6 in Birmingham, and she will meet with students and young faculty at UAB, as well as receive a $5,000 honorarium.
Morton joined Virginia Tech in July 2016. She previously served as chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. There, she directed the Comparative Effectiveness Research Center in the Health Policy Institute and held appointments in the university’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Department of Statistics, and the Clinical and Translation Science Institute. Before entering academia, Morton served as vice president for Statistics and Epidemiology at RTI International and was head of the RAND Corporation Statistics Group.
Morton also served as president of the American Statistical Association in 2009, and was the 2013 chair of Section U (Statistics) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a Fellow of both organizations. She also is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology. In 2015, she was honored with the ASA Founder’s Award, and was the Lowell Reed Invited Lecturer for the American Public Health Association’s Applied Public Health Statistics Section.
Among her books is the recently published “Methods in Comparative Effectiveness Research,” which Morton co-edited with fellow biostatistician Constantine Gatsonis of Brown University.
Each recipient of the Janet L. Norwood Award is to be an internationally recognized statistician. In giving the award, UAB’s Department of Biostatistics says it wishes to “recognize the contribution of all women to the statistical sciences.” It added, “Women have been traditionally under-represented many fields of science, with the degree of under-representation greater for the quantitative sciences. This denies the field the benefit of the great contributions women are obviously capable of making to the statistical sciences. Establishing this award will help promote the active involvement of women in the statistical sciences at all levels from high school through senior faculty and scientists.”