John Bailer, Richard Campbell, and Rosemary Pennington receive the award “for their engaging, entertaining, and enlightening Stats + Stories podcast that for over six years has brought ‘the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics’ to public radio and a broad podcast audience.”
John Bailer
Response of John Bailer
I am deeply honored and delighted to be a recipient of this award. It is truly humbling to have our work in the company of outstanding communicators who previously won this prize including John Allen Paulos, whose books influenced my thinking about communicating mathematical and statistical concepts to a general audience. JPBM – thank you for recognizing the Stats + Stories team with this tremendous honor.
One of my first reactions to hearing about this award was the recognition of the importance of partnering with good people. I’ve been blessed to collaborate with Richard Campbell for more than a decade and with Rosemary Pennington during the last six years. These colleagues are tremendous professionals, and I’ve learned much from our work together. It really isn’t accurate to refer to this as ‘work’ – the podcast has been a vocational avocation.
Thanks are due to the many colleagues who helped make the ‘on air’ panel sound and look good (sound and recording engineers, web page support, and podcast / show production), including Bob Long as our first moderator, and the College of Arts and Science at Miami University for facilities and other resources contributing to the podcast. Sponsorship and other support from the American Statistical Association allowed the podcast to go to a weekly release schedule, and the connection with Significance magazine provided a means to connect to a larger pool of potential guests with interesting stories.
During times when allegations of false news are common and trust in science varies, there continues to be a call for a forum to consider the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics, and I hope that our podcast can continue in this role. (photo courtesy Miami University).
Biographical Sketch of John Bailer
Bailer is a University Distinguished Professor and founding Chair of the Department of Statistics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is also an affiliate member of the Departments of Biology, Media, Journalism and Film, Sociology and Gerontology and the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. He received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and statistics and in psychology from Miami University and received a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a staff fellow at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences before joining the faculty at Miami University in 1988.
He is President of the International Statistical Institute (2019-2021), and he previously served on the Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Society for Risk Analysis, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research has focused on quantitative risk estimation, but he has also collaborated on research addressing problems in toxicology, environmental health, and occupational safety. Promoting quantitative literacy and enhancing connections between statistics and journalism are more recent passions. The Stats + Stories podcast he developed with journalism colleagues grew out of that interest.
He enjoys hanging out with his family and kids, walking his dog, reading fun fiction, traveling internationally or working on his Butler County donut trail passport.
Richard Campbell
Response of Richard Campbell
I was stunned. I thought my numerical literacy prowess had peaked during my Dayton, Ohio, high school days when I served as president of the sophomore math club. But to the point: It has been an absolute pleasure working with our team on Stats + Stories. So much so that I keep doing it in retirement, still learning from the terrific guests we have had on the podcast over the years. At Miami, John Bailer and I had worked together to get a quantitative literacy requirement into our college’s curriculum. As part of that initiative, we team taught an honors class called “News and Numbers” in 2009 and developed the podcast in 2013. As a one-time reporter and long-time journalism educator (with some math phobia issues), I remember how nervous I was in that first class with John. But when he put up a data graph culled from a national newspaper and asked the students, “What’s the story here?”, I relaxed. Storytelling is something I knew about and to realize this renowned statistician expected a good data chart to tell a story put me at ease. John and I had common ground. I do recommend that every journalism student take statistics courses and that every math and stats major take journalism courses (plus, all our high schools should be requiring quantitative literacy classes). The ability for a mathematician or scientist to translate the complexities of her work into a story for a general audience is key to challenging the anti-science and anti-evidence strains running through our mediated culture. John, Rosemary, and I are grateful for this prestigious award … and proud of our Stats + Stories work. Thank you. (photo courtesy Miami University)!
Biographical Sketch of Richard Campbell
Campbell is Professor Emeritus and founding Chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University. He is the author of 60 Minutes and the News: A Mythology for Middle America and co-author of Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade and the Reagan Legacy, and the lead author of three textbooks, including Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age, now in its 12th edition. Campbell earned his B.A. in English from Marquette University and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in the Radio-Television-Film department. He also worked as a print reporter and broadcast news writer in Milwaukee. In his 48-year teaching career, he has also worked at Mount Mary College, UW-Milwaukee, Middle Tennessee State University, and the University of Michigan. In addition to the Stats + Stories podcast, his most recent projects include the digital Oxford Observer and Report for Ohio -- initiatives aimed at getting more young journalists real-world experience and hired to cover under-reported areas in both rural and urban communities. He is also the executive producer of Training for Freedom: How Ordinary People in an Unusual Time & Unlikely Place Made Extraordinary History, a 2019 documentary on Oxford’s role in the historic events of Freedom Summer in 1964. A former high school English teacher and girls’ basketball coach in the Milwaukee Public School system, Campbell grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where in 2015 he served on the city’s planning committee for the 20th anniversary of Dayton Peace Accords. In 2019, Campbell received Miami University’s Benjamin Harrison Medallion Award "For Outstanding Contribution to the Education of the Nation."
Rosemary Pennington
Response of Rosemary Pennington
This is perhaps the most surprising thing to have happened to me in my professional life! Thank you, Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, for this honor and for the recognition of our work. I once counted myself among those who professed to hate math – born more out of frustration with how it was taught than any real feelings about the subject itself. As a working journalist I carved out a niche as a science and medical reporter which helped me develop a deep appreciation for all that math can help us understand about our world; it was an appreciation that only grew during my graduate studies. Sometimes, all it takes is the right story, or the right storyteller, to unlock the beauty of math for someone who may have struggled with it in the past. (That was certainly the case for me.) One of the things I have loved about my work with Stats + Stories is that I learn so much with each interview. Hearing our guests tell the stories of their research, field, or methodology has made a subject that, in my youth, felt very abstract feel very accessible. It’s really been a privilege to be part of this program and I am truly honored that our work on Stats + Stories has been recognized in this way. (photo courtesy Miami University).
Biographical Sketch of Rosemary Pennington
Rosemary Pennington is an assistant professor of journalism in Miami University’s Department of Media, Journalism & Film. Her research focuses on media representations of marginalized groups, with a specific focus on the representations of Muslims. She’s the co-editor of the books The Media World of ISIS and On Islam: Muslims and the Media from Indiana University Press. Pennington received her Ph.D. in mass communication from Indiana University in 2015. In her pre-academic life, she worked as a broadcast journalist in the newsrooms of public broadcasters WOUB and WBHM. While working at WBHM, Pennington’s science and medical reporting helped her win the Alabama Associated Press's Best Specialized Reporter award two years in a row and the Douglas L. Cannon Broadcast Award for Excellence in Medical Reporting three years in a row.
Erica Klarreich
Erica Klarreich receives the award “for her work as a writer and popularizer of mathematics and science. She writes about mathematics and theoretical computer science, and her writing has been chosen for and reprinted in
Best Writing on Mathematics in four different years. Her works have appeared in
Quanta, The Atlantic, New Scientist, Science News, Wired and other publications for a general audience. Erica Klarreich received a PhD in mathematics in 1997.”
Response of Erica Klarreich
It is a great honor to join the ranks of the previous recipients of this prize, whom I deeply admire. It has been my privilege to tell the stories of mathematics over the past two decades, and I look forward to the stories the coming years will bring.
Many people helped me reach the point where I could share these stories, and I’d like to mention a few: my parents, Emily and Paul Klarreich, both math teachers, who taught me the family trade from my earliest days; my Ph.D. adviser, Yair Minsky, who introduced me to one of the most beautiful areas of mathematics, three-dimensional hyperbolic geometry; my professors at UC Santa Cruz (especially Robert Irion), who helped turn me from a mathematician into a journalist; and my editor at Quanta Magazine, Thomas Lin. When he feels that one of my drafts needs improvement, he sends me a list of suggestions that always contains at least three impossible tasks. Then I figure out how to do them, and my article is immeasurably better.
I have found over the years that the stories that resonate the most with readers are those with a powerful human element. My readers want to understand mathematics, but they also want to understand you: the people who have dedicated your lives to the pursuit of mathematical beauty and discovery. They want to know about your struggles and your triumphs, your disappointments and your flashes of joy.
I believe that even those readers who found their own math education mind-numbing or traumatic still feel, on some level, that mathematics is an inextricable component of the human experience. And when the human element in a story is compelling, my readers are willing to dive into the hardest research areas at the frontiers of modern mathematics.
Many of my most successful stories have come about because some mathematician told me about something amazing that was happening in their field. So, I’d like to end with an invitation: When you hear about a beautiful new advance, please share it with me or other mathematics communicators, so that we can share it in turn with the broader public. Reading about your stories gives people an opportunity to see the world through your eyes, catch a glimpse of the mathematical beauty that motivates you, and emerge with an enlarged sense of human potential.
Biographical Sketch of Erica Klarreich
Erica Klarreich has been writing about mathematics and science for a popular audience for more than 20 years. She has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stony Brook University and was a postdoc at the University of Michigan for three years. She is a graduate of the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
As a freelance journalist based in Berkeley, California, she has written hundreds of articles for a wide range of publications, including Quanta Magazine, Nature, New Scientist, Science News and Nautilus. Her articles for Quanta have been syndicated in Wired, The Atlantic and Scientific American and have been translated into many languages. Her work has been reprinted in the 2010, 2011, 2016 and 2020 volumes of “The Best Writing on Mathematics” and in the Quanta Magazine anthology “The Prime Number Conspiracy.”
She was the journalist in residence at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley in 2002 and at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. She has appeared on the Numberphile YouTube series and was the narrator for two mathematics documentaries by ZALA Films: Secrets of the Surface, about the life and work of Maryam Mirzakhani, and Counting from Infinity, about Yitang Zhang’s work on the twin primes conjecture.
About the Award
The Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) Communications Award, established by the JPBM in 1988, is given annually to reward and encourage communicators who, on a sustained basis, bring mathematical ideas and information to non-mathematical audiences. The JPBM is a collaborative effort of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, American Statistical Association, Mathematical Association of America.
Find out more about the award and see past recipients here.