Bruce Turnbull, Cornell University professor of operations research and industrial engineering, has been named chair of the university's Department of Statistical Science. He succeeds Charles McCulloch, professor of biometrics.

Turnbull was educated at Cambridge University (B.A. '67) and Cornell (Ph.D. '71). Following appointments at Stanford University and Oxford University, he joined the Cornell faculty in 1976. In 1979 he was awarded the Snedecor Memorial Award by the American Statistical Association in recognition of his research.

The new chair has been a consultant to many organizations, including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He currently is on the Data and Safety Monitoring Committees for several major national and international clinical trials for the prevention of cancer, of heart disease and of AIDS, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. He is an associate editor of the journals Statistics in Medicine and of Lifetime Data Analysis. He has published over 100 journal articles and is the author, with Chris Jennison, of a recent book on statistical methods for the design, monitoring and analysis of clinical trials.

Turnbull's major area of research concerns the design and analysis of experiments for understanding the reliability and performance of a system, either a physical or a biological one. The topics he is exploring in this area include robust inference, efficient designs for quality monitoring of laboratory work, failure-time analysis when treatment effect might be lagged, and the study of marker processes as indicators of degradation or failure. Applications of this last topic include use of PSA as a biomarker for prostate cancer.

The interdisciplinary Department of Statistical Science was created in 1997 and is responsible for coordination of statistical activities across all colleges of the university, and includes a Ph.D. program. A new degree program, the master of professional studies in applied statistics, will admit its first entering class this fall.