Given by the university’s Department of Biostatistics, the award recognizes outstanding career achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences.  McClure will present a lecture on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 and receive an honorarium.  Due to COVID-19 the lecture will be held via Zoom. 

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.

McClure joined Drexel University in 2015. She previously served as a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. There, she was the Head of the Section on Research Methods and Clinical Trials.

McClure also served as president of the Alabama Chapter of the American Statistical Association, Chair of the Board of Directors for the National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Sciences, and is a Fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the Society for Clinical Trials. She was the organizer and session chair for the 2020 International Conference on Health Policy Statistics’ “Using Data to Inform the ASA’s Policy on Sexual Misconduct”. In 2020, she was honored with the Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health’s Golden Apple Teaching Award.

McClure holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Kansas and a doctoral degree in biostatistics from the University of Michigan.