Given by the university’s Department of Biostatistics, the award recognizes outstanding career achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences. Herring will be honored at a dinner September 10, 2019, in Birmingham, and will meet with students and young faculty at UAB, and receive a $5,000 honorarium.

In 2002, UAB said each recipient of the Janet L. Norwood Award is to be an internationally recognized statistician. In giving the award, UAB’s Department of Biostatistics said it wishes to “recognize the contribution of all women to the statistical sciences.” It added, “Women have been traditionally underrepresented in many fields of science, with the degree of under-representation greater for the quantitative sciences. This denies the field the benefit of the great contributions women are obviously capable of making to the statistical sciences. Establishing this award will help promote the active involvement of women in the statistical sciences at all levels from high school through senior faculty and scientists.”

Norwood was the first woman commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and is past-president of the American Statistical Association. She served as presidential appointment to the Chair of the Advisory Council on Unemployment Compensation from 1993-96, under then President Bill Clinton. From 1979 through 1991, she was the U.S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics, responsible for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and its work in compilation, publication, and interpretation of statistics on employment and unemployment, prices, compensation, industrial relations, productivity, and economic growth. Norwood received a Distinguished rank in the Senior Executive Service from President Ronald Reagan.

Herring joined Duke University in 2017. She previously served as a Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, she was the Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor of Children’s Environmental Health and a Fellow of the Carolina Population Center.

Herring also served as president of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society in 2011, and was the 2017 chair of the American Statistical Association Biometrics section, and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. She has received both the Lagakos Distinguished Alumni Award from the Harvard University Department of Biostatistics (2018) and Outstanding Young Alumna of the Year from the University of Mississippi (2005). In 2012, she was honored with the Washington Statistical Society & Research Triangle Institute’s Gertrude M. Cox Award for Outstanding Contributions to Applied Statistics.

Herring holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and English from the University of Mississippi and a doctoral degree in biostatistics from Harvard University.