College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Dual assignment

He may not have become an engineer, but the discipline still is interesting for Stephen Vardeman.
If lineage had anything to do with it, Stephen Vardeman would be an engineer right now.

"My dad and oldest son are both engineers," he said. "When I came to college, I thought I wanted to be an engineer as well."

Those dreams fell by the wayside during Vardeman's sophomore year at Iowa State.

"I wound up in mathematics. By graduate school I had moved over to statistics," he said.

But the engineering bug wouldn't leave Vardeman, who holds dual appointments as a professor in the Department of Statistics and in the College of Engineering (Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering).

"I really like the physical sciences and technology," he said. "I like helping figure out how things work and how to make them work better.

"But I believe I was born to be a statistician. I'm reasonably good at it and I really enjoy it. Plus I believe what I'm doing is useful and important."

He may have been born to be a statistician, but engineering is still important in Vardeman's academic life. He is the author of Statistics for Engineering Problem Solving, the winner of the 1994 ASEE Meriam-Wiley Distinguished Author Award for an outstanding new engineering textbook. He is also the co-author of both Statistical Quality Assurance Methods for Engineers and Basic Engineering Data Collection and Analysis.

Early in his academic career, Vardeman wrote a basic statistics textbook and is currently working on a fifth book.

"These later books have grown out of years of teaching statistics to undergraduate engineers," Vardeman said. "I think I'm pretty good at laying ideas out ideas clearly and seeing what is really essentail methodology for a given audience."

A Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an (elected) Ordinary Member of the International Statistical Institute, Vardeman served as editor of Technometrics for three years.

His professional interests revolve around the engineering applications of statistics, statistical education for engineers, and the development of new statistical theory and methods.

He has taught a number of industrial short courses on such industrial campuses as Hewlett-Packard and John Deere and has research collaborations ongoing with colleagues at General Motors and Los Alamos National Lab.

All of which led the Iowa Board of Regents to honor Vardeman and four other Iowa State faculty members this fall with the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence. The award reflects the recipient's commitment to excellence and to continuing professional development.

"As a statistician I get to mess around in a lot of people's business," he said. "I wouldn't necessarily want to do the things they do every day. But I get to contribute insights about efficient and effective data collection in a real problem, possibly develop some new methodology, and then move on to something else.

"It's really fun stuff. The engineers I work with are often focused on nitty gritty details that I donÕ\'t have to worry about. But I can nevertheless be a real collaborator on a variety of projects."