Wilcoxon Award

The Wilcoxon Award is an award given to the authors of the paper judged to be the best practical application paper published in the journal Technometrics each year. The award is one of two major annual awards sponsored by the journal, the other being the Jack Youden Prize for the best expository paper.

History and administration

The award was established in 1969 and is named in honor of Frank Wilcoxon, an American chemist and statistician known for developing several important non-parametric statistical tests, including the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.
Technometrics is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal co-published by the American Society for Quality and the American Statistical Association. The journal focuses on the intersection of statistics and the physical, chemical, and engineering sciences, publishing papers that emphasize the development and practical application of statistical methods in those fields.
The Wilcoxon Award specifically recognizes the paper judged to provide the greatest contribution to the practical application of statistics in industry and science.

Award criteria and recognition

Among the papers published in the previous year's volume, a selection is made by the journal's Award's Committee based upon the paper's practical impact, and application quality.
The award is typically announced and presented at the annual Fall Technical Conference, which is co-sponsored by the ASQ Statistics Division, the ASA Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences, and the ASA Section on Quality and Productivity.

Notable recipients

Recipients of the Wilcoxon Award are often recognized for providing novel, high-impact statistical solutions to complex industrial and scientific challenges. Past recipients include:

Frank E. Grubbs - recipient of the inaugural Wilcoxon Prize, co-awarded with the Jack Youden Prize, for a paper published in 1968.
William S. Cleveland - statistician known for developing local regression and data visualization techniques.
Daniel W. Apley - for papers he published about blind signal separation and concept drift
Marc Genton and Stefano Castruccio - for their paper on statistical models for compressing global 3D spatio-temporal temperature ensembles in climate simulations.