Marllyn T. Boswell

Associate Professor of Statistics, Emeritus
Ph.D.: University of California, 1965

Summary of research interests

Dr. Boswell has been associated with the Northeast Fisheries Center of NOAA since 1978 and has participated in collaborative research on many fishery problems such as poststratification of the research trawl survey and development of procedures to improve the estimation of age-length keys and indexing of the health of the marine environment. He was faculty associate of the Center for Statistical Ecology and Environmental Statistics and worked on projects for the EPA on statistical techniques for the assessment of hazardous waste sites. Dr. Boswell has been a member of the Data Identification Working Group of the Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee since its inception. For several years he has been a member of the Penn State group of statistical scientists cooperating on problems in ecology.

An important interest of Dr. Boswell's is the computer generation of random variables. This interest has been valuable in applied problems in the study of properties of estimators that are too complicated to solve using analytical techniques. He has helped set up simulation methods currently in use at the Woods Hole Laboratory of Northeast Fisheries Center. He has developed a package of routines useful for simulation studies on PCs. This package has been installed, and is heavily used, on computers in the Department of Statistics and on the IBM mainframe computer at Penn State.

Representative publications

Babu, G. J., M. T. Boswell, K. Chatterjee, E. Linder, G. P. Patil, and C. Taillie. 1986. Statistical issues in combining ecological studies with examples from marine fisheries research and management. In Proceedings ASA/EPA Conference on Statistical Issues in Combining Environmental Studies. Washington, D.C.: EPA.

Boswell, M. T., K. P. Burnham, and G. P. Patil. 1987. Role and use of composite sampling and capture-recapture sampling in ecological studies. Invited paper in the Volume on Sampling in the Series on Developments in Statistics. North-Holland Publishing Co.

Boswell, M. T., and G. P. Patil. 1987. A perspective of composite sampling. Invited paper for Experiments in Factor Screening: Special Issue of Communications in Statistics Theoretical Methods 16:3069-3093.

Boswell, M. T., G. P. Patil, and J. S. O'Connor. 1987. Quantifying the severity of hypoxic effects. In Dissolved Oxygen in the Chesapeake Bay: Processes and Effects, edited by Gail B. Mackiernan, 159-174. College Park, MD: A Maryland Sea Grant Publication.

Boswell, M. T., K. P. Burnham, and G. P. Patil. 1988. Role and use of composite sampling and capture-recapture sampling in ecological studies. In Handbook of Statistics, edited by P. R. Krishnaiah and C. R. Rao, 6:469-488. North Holland: Elsevier Science Publ. B. V.