Shane Reese’s career sounds like a boyhood dream: full of sports, bombs, race cars and space exploration.
He worked with nuclear weapons and helped the National Academy of Science monitor the demolition of two chemical weapons stockpiles. He consulted for an NFL team and the U.S. Olympic volleyball team. He published original research on baseball legend Babe Ruth and NASCAR icon Jeff Gordon. And he predicts the power of solar storms and helps government scientists understand a shape-shifting mass of energy on the edge of our galaxy.
For all that, this year he will join the hall of fame for statisticians by being named a fellow of the American Statistical Association.
“To my knowledge, Shane will be only the 5th resident of Utah to receive the honor, and the first since 2001,” said Dennis Tolley, chair of BYU’s department of statistics. “The title of fellow puts Dr. Reese in a club with statisticians that have changed the landscape of the science world. This gives Dr. Reese superstar status among statisticians and adds notoriety to the department of statistics.”
The official citation notes his “key scientific contributions to national security and defense” among other things. But the overarching theme of Reese’s career at BYU is that he answers tricky questions from a variety of fields.
A prime example is his latest study on solar storms. The National Center for Atmospheric Research wants to develop a system to forecast space weather so they can protect earth’s satellite systems – and our cell phone service – from enormous solar flare-ups that happen every few years.
These storms are relatively rare but incredibly powerful, requiring a high-dimension statistical model which he published in The Annals of Applied Statistics.
“Prediction is the end goal – to better predict both the time and intensity of the storms,” said Reese.
Prior to his space work, Reese helped the International Whaling Commission with another challenging problem. In order to establish sustainable quotas and calendars for Eskimo subsistence hunts, the commission needed to know where the bowhead whales mated, where they gave birth, and how long a pregnancy lasted. Even with limited data, they arrived at a reliable estimate that a bowhead whale pregnancy lasts about 441 days.
“A lot of the things that I do are fascinating and I love them,” Reese said. “But all those other things I do so that I can pay the bills and go home and do some sports analysis.”
For the rest of the story, see BYU News.