Randy Sitter was born in 1961 in New Westminster, British Columbia. When he was 9, his family moved to Prince George where he attended high school with Deanna, now his wife. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 1984 and a Master’s degree in Statistics in 1986 at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He switched to Statistics after a Mathematics Professor once told him “You’re good.... but you’re not that good. Perhaps you should go into statistics.” To finance his studies at UBC, Randy supported himself doing carpentry and tree planting. Based on data records he kept of his career as a reforester (as might be expected of a future statistician), he estimates that he planted over 300,000 seedlings, which amounts to some 300 hectares of forest regenerated for the benefit of the province.

To  pursue doctoral studies, Randy went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and worked under the supervision of Professor C.F. Jeff Wu. When the latter accepted a position at the University of Waterloo, Randy followed him. In 1990, he defended there his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Resampling procedures for complex survey data.” As early as January 1990, he became Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University. While there, he played a major role in the development of the department’s computing resources.  He moved to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at SFU in January 1995 and then became a charter member of the new Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science in May 2001.

Randy’s thesis concerned bootstrap methods which are applicable to complex survey designs of the sort actually in use at statistical agencies. Over the years, he has worked in a variety of areas, making major contributions in survey sampling and in experimental design and industrial statistics. Within these areas, he has worked on variance estimation in complex surveys, imputation, empirical likelihood methods in surveys, optimal design for bioassays, the use of orthogonal multi-arrays for balanced repeated sampling, minimum aberration designs, and more. He published extensively in the most influential journals such as Technometrics, Biometrika, the Journal of the American Statistical Associationand The Canadian Journal of Statistics, among many others.

Since he earned his doctorate, Randy has also made outstanding contributions to the profession, notably through graduate supervision, editorial service, involvement in professional statistical societies, the organization of meetings and active participation in the growth of his department at SFU. He has been an Associate Editor of Survey Methodology,  Biometrics, Technometrics, and The Canadian Journal of Statistics. Since January 2004 he is Editor-Elect of Technometrics. He is currently supervising four doctoral students; two more have already graduated: Changbao Wu, now at the University of Waterloo, and Derek Bingham, now holding a Tier II Canada Research Chair at SFU. At the Master’s level, Randy has had nine students graduate and is currently supervising two more. A former member of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Society of Ottawa and of the Board of Directors of the SSC, he has also been President of the Survey Methods section of the SSC.

In addition to having contributed in a major way to the development of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at SFU, Randy is a crucial component in its basketball program. He began playing ball at Kelly Road Secondary School. After his first year at UBC, he returned to Prince George to play for the College of New Caledonia basketball team. They were provincial champions in the season 1980-81 and third at the Canadian championships that year. Because “he is tall, but not that tall,” Randy eventually returned to UBC to complete his degree, a choice for which his colleagues at SFU are thankful.

Randy Sitter is the sixth recipient of the CRM-SSC Prize. Previous winners of the award were Christian Genest (Université Laval, 1999), Robert J. Tibshirani (Stanford University, 2000), Colleen D. Cutler (University of Waterloo, 2001), Larry A. Wasserman (Carnegie Mellon University, 2002), and Charmaine B. Dean (Simon Fraser University, 2003).

Christian Genest, Université Laval Chair of the CRM-SSC Prize Committee