Mary Ellen Johnston Bock is a retired American statistician, now a professor emeritus at Purdue University[1] after becoming the first female full professor of statistics and the first female chair of the department there.
[3] As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Bock earned a bachelor's degree in the German language in 1967.
[1] She switched to mathematics for her graduate studies at the same university, completing her PhD in 1974 under the supervision of Robert B. Ash with a dissertation on Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution.
[2] Bock is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,[1] and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
[6] She won the Founders Award of the American Statistical Association in 2013.