UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Matthew Beckman, associate research professor of statistics in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State and executive director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, has been honored with the 2025 Waller Education Award by the American Statistical Association (ASA). The Waller Awards were established by a contribution from retired ASA executive director Ray Waller and his wife, Carolyn. The Waller Education Award honors individuals for innovation in the instruction of elementary statistics or data science.
Beckman was chosen for the Waller Award for his more than 20 years of statistics teaching experience; excellence in teaching across a variety of statistics and data science courses; innovation, scholarship and creative efforts in education; and impact in statistics education beyond Penn State. The award was presented to Beckman during the ASA President’s Address and Awards event during the annual Joint Statistical Meetings, held this year on Aug. 5 in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Dr. Beckman is an international leader in statistics education research,” said Nicole Lazar, department head and professor of statistics. “I am gratified that the American Statistical Association has recognized his accomplishments through the Waller Education Award. This is a great, and well deserved, honor for Matt and we in the Department of Statistics join him in celebrating this achievement.”
Beckman's research interests include statistics and data science education, especially postsecondary teaching, learning and assessment. He is currently the principal investigator of the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded project CLASSIFIES: Common Language Assessment in Studying Statistics with Instructional Feedback and Increased Enrollment Scalability. CLASSIFIES seeks to develop and investigate tools that leverage natural language processing to assist STEM instructors in large-enrollment classes with providing student feedback on short-answer tasks.
Beckman’s previous awards and honors include being selected as the 2025 New Zealand Statistical Association Visiting Lecturer and receiving the 2017 Tombros Fellowship Award from Penn State.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2016, Beckman was an instructor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota in 2015 and a teaching specialist at the University of Minnesota from 2008 to 2009. Beckman also worked in the medical technology sector as a senior statistician at Medtronic and a senior biostatistician at Nonin Medical. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Penn State in 2006 and a master’s degree in statistics and a doctoral degree in educational psychology at the University of Minnesota in 2008 and 2015, respectively.