UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — It was quite by accident that Hoben Thomas and Thomas Hettmansperger, both newly arrived faculty members at Penn State, met one day in 1967, but the chance meeting sparked a more-than-40-year research collaboration and longstanding family friendship. To honor that friendship, their families, and the important role that the field of statistics played in their lives, they have established the Hoben and Patricia Thomas and Thomas and Ann Hettmansperger Early Career Professorship in Statistics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science. The endowed position will rotate to promising faculty members in the first decade of their academic careers.
“Back in the early days, I sat in on a Department of Statistics course, and I had a theoretical question I wanted to have answered,” said Thomas. “So I called the fellow who taught the course, but he wasn’t there. At the time, he and Tom shared the same office in McAllister Building, so I got Tom, and that’s how it started.”
Thomas, professor emeritus of psychology, and Hettmansperger, professor emeritus of statistics, published their first paper together in 1973. Over the years, they published several additional papers that have led to novel ways of thinking about cognitive development in children. Some of their research explored problems related to mixture models, which can be used to tease apart information from multiple groups when the data are all mixed together. Their work also addressed challenges with categorizing behavior of children, who often have trouble verbalizing their understanding of cognitive tasks. They further developed statistical methods for analyzing these data.
“Our most recent paper was just published in 2017, so we have published these papers over a span of about 44 years,” said Hettmansperger. “One of our papers resulted in about 10 years of National Science Foundation research grants, which supported many students as well as faculty member and recent department head, Dave Hunter. We held a weekly seminar and brought in visitors from other universities that had been working in that field of research. It was a very productive and exciting research project.”
