Prof. Marc Genton has been appointed as the next Editor-in-Chief of Stat, the ISI online journal for rapid dissemination of statistics research. Prof. Genton will begin his term in January 1, 2015 until December 31, 2017.

Prof. Genton is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He received the El-Shaarawi Award for Excellence from The International Environmetrics Society in 2010 and the Distinguished Achievement award from the Section on Statistics and the Environment of the American Statistical Association in the same year. "I feel very honored to have been selected for the Editor-in-Chief position for Stat, and I am very pleased that KAUST is associated with this exciting new journal," Genton said.

Stat was launched in August 2012 as an innovative electronic journal for the rapid publication of novel and topical research results. It publishes compact articles of the highest quality in all areas of statistics.

"Stat is revolutionizing how research is published in statistics and is well positioned to become a leading journal in this field. In addition, it takes advantage of modern discussion forums with a blog for statistics research and has no limit on supporting electronic material such as data, graphs, videos, and software," Genton said, when asked about what he liked about the online journal.

He says that as editor-in-chief, he plans to maintain the speed to publication, which is a unique and key characteristic of the journal. He also plans to further improve the quality of accepted papers. "I know this is an ambitious goal but it fits very well with an ambitious university like KAUST," he said.

Genton has published over 170 articles in scientific journals, has edited a book on multivariate skew-elliptical distributions, and has given over 280 presentations at conferences and universities worldwide.

- By Michelle Ponto, KAUST News