TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Dr. Subhabrata “Subha” Chakraborti, a professor of statistics at The University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Commerce, has been elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Chakraborti received a bachelor’s degree from the Presidency College, Calcutta, India, and master’s and doctorate degrees in statistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The distinctive designation of fellow is reserved for professionals in statistics who make outstanding contributions to the field. American Statistical Association members work in government, industry and academia applying statistics in medical, biological, physical, economic and social sciences.

The fellow designation is limited to no more than one-third of 1 percent of the ASA membership, which now is about 18,000 in the United States, Canada and overseas.

“Dr. Chakraborti is both a world renowned researcher and world renowned teacher,” said Dr. J. Barry Mason, dean of the Culverhouse College of Commerce. “Statistics play an important role in the lives of all of us. You must be able to separate good reasoning from faulty reasoning. Statistics allows us to react intelligently to information we receive. To achieve the designation of fellow in this important discipline is a great accomplishment, and Dr. Chakraborti is to be congratulated.”

Chakraborti is the fourth Culverhouse faculty member to receive the designation.

The others are Drs. Jean Gibbons, Badrig Kurkjian and William Woodall.

Chakraborti specializes in the area of nonparametric statistics, a branch of statistics that deals with methods that allow one to make valid statistical inference without assuming a particular parametric distribution. His current research interests include the field of statistical quality control.

Chakraborti has collaborated with notable national and international scholars, has published more than 50 articles in a variety of journals, co-authored a well-respected nonparametric statistics textbook and has made numerous presentations in both national and international venues.

He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa in 2004 and has won a number of research and teaching awards including the Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for significant and meritorious achievement in teaching at The University of Alabama.

The American Statistical Association was founded in Boston in 1839 and counts among its members Florence Nightingale, Alexander Graham Bell, Herman Hollerith, Andrew Carnegie and Martin Van Buren.

ASA members apply their expertise in a number of areas, including research in medical areas such as AIDS; environmental risk assessment; the development of new therapeutic drugs; the exploration of space; quality assurance in industry; the examination of social issues such as the homeless and the poor; analytic research on current business problems and economic forecasting; the setting of standards for statistics used at all levels of government; the promotion and development of statistical education for the public and the profession and the expansion of methods and the use of computers and graphics to advance the science of statistics.

The University of Alabama, a student-centered research university, is in the midst of planned, steady enrollment growth with a goal of reaching 28,000 students by 2010. This growth, which is positively impacting the campus and the state's economy, is in keeping with UA's vision to be the university of choice for the best and brightest students. UA, the state's flagship university, is an academic community united in its commitment to enhancing the quality of life for all Alabamians.