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Education

  • PhD, Statistics and Economics, jointly, Iowa State University, 1967.
  • MS, Statistics, University of Wyoming, 1963.
  • MS, Industrial Management, University of Wyoming, 1960.
  • Bachelor of General Education, University of Omaha (now U. Of Nebraska) 1957.

Experience

2004-2010: Museum of the Rockies – part-time volunteer, trained docent and gardener.

1997-2012: Habitat for Humanity – contributed kitchen cabinet renewal and hanging.

1969-1995: Montana State University  Bozeman

  •  1/3 time phase-out beginning in 1992
  • Montana Agricultural Experiment Station –  Statistician (1/5 time beginning in 1977; full-time beginning in 1981).
  • Department of Mathematical Sciences – Professor 1985 - 1995; Professor Emeritus since 1995.

1967-1969: Mexico's National Agricultural School, employed by Iowa State University under grant from the Ford Foundation to develop MS-level programs in economics and statistics.

1964-1967: Iowa State University

  • Research Associate, Iowa State Experiment Station, 1966-67, at 3/4 time.
  • Graduate Teaching Assistantship, 1964-66.

1957-1964: University of Wyoming

  • Five years - Research Associate (faculty level) in Division of Business and Economic Research, Assistant Professor with tenure at departure, acting director last year 1963-64.

  • Western Data Processing Center, Assistantship by IBM, 1957-58.

  • Graduate Assistantship, Industrial Management, 1958-59.

1953-1956: U.S. Air force

Recent Recognition

  • U.S. President's Call to Service Award, 2006.
  • Appreciation from about 50 young families receiving a house under their ownership, and from about 300  groups of children offered guided tours through the Museum of the Rockies exhibits (dinosaurs, indigenous peoples, early MT history, Tinsley House).

Research areas

Statistical tables, computational algorithms, statistical methods packages, statistical assistance on many agricultural research projects.

Publications

Hold Yer Nose, here we go, (2016) - a 412 page family history.

Refereed papers before retirement - 33.

Books and technical reports - 2 small (20-40 pages), 8 larger (80 or more pages).

Computer package MSUSTAT distributed free to MSU users and sold off-campus across the world.

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Brief Narrative: Upon Becoming a Statistician

I, Richard (Dick) E. Lund was born in 1932 in mid-western Nebraska, that year well into the Great Depression of the 1930s, and with its amplified effect of extreme drought across the Great Plains. I remember no times of hunger, rather helping an innovative Mother carry windmill-pumped water to a meager garden. Five years of drought-stricken crop failures brought my family into a three-day migration westward in a steaming worn-out Model-T Ford pulling an overloaded trailer. We settled into a new irrigated-farming project in central Wyoming. I attended school at Shoshoni.

We were developing our new farm from raw prairie as World War II commenced in 1941. I learned to burn sage brush, drive teams of horses, construct farm buildings from ground up―maybe I would be carpenter someday. Our little high school, then after wartime, had hired young, well-qualified, inspiring, WWII veterans into its faculty. Graduating in 1950, I could wonder what value would two years of Spanish language, a year of Economics, and learning to type, would ever have for me. I expected to be just another farmer like Dad? Anyway, I attended the University of Wyoming for one year, but couldn’t afford any more!  

The Korean Conflict started too, near my graduation in 1950. A calming period had developed, yet with no truce, by early 1953. I saw my draft notice coming and I joined the Air Force. My typing skill eventually brought me into an administrative unit supporting one of the Generals in the Strategic Air Command Headquarters, at Offutt AFB near Omaha, NE. This was the commanding-base operating the big bombers protecting (?) the free world from Russian-communist domination by “mutually assured destruction.”

Omaha U.(now part of Nebraska U.) offered a wide variety of night-school courses out at the Base. Taking many of these, adding in some more by correspondence, and more yet by a “mere challenge” for a passing grade, enabled me to “corral” more than enough credits for a Bachelor of General Education (1957). I had enrolled on campus for one more semester which allowed signing-out of the Air Force ninety days early.

My new bride Lillian and I headed west, on a cold 20-below January day in 1957, for me to begin a graduate program within the College of Commerce and Industry (C&I) at the University of Wyoming (UW). I had no academic goal ahead of time, but it didn’t matter. I expected to be back on the home farm soon , or maybe working as a carpenter!

C&I was the home for courses in accounting, industrial management, statistics and others. I was paying my own way on just the GI Bill, with no graduate assistantship at first. But one soon was granted to me through the Western Data Processing Center, it being funded by IBM. I learned practical use of IBM punched-card equipment that first summer while waiting for the new IBM 650 to arrive at the University of California campus in Los Angles (UCLA). [see Statistical Calculation Facilities: 1920-1950s]

Finally settling in early 1959 upon a MS thesis topic “An Examination of Managements Objectives for Installing an Electronic Data Processing System,” I was awarded an MS in Industrial Management (1960).

I had been accepted for faculty-level position in 1959 as a research associate in the Division of Business and Economic Research, that being another department in C&I. One noteworthy research project of mine used survey-collected data for 26 industries in applying a Leontief Input-Output model [Leontief, Wassily W., The Structure of American Economy, 1919-1939. NY, Oxford U. Press, 1959.] to portray the local economy for a four-county area specified as Southwestern Wyoming. Leontief  models provide overall accumulated detailed economic activity resulting from new Input "dollars" coming into an economy. Such a model had been developed for a national economy before but never for a local economy.3

My results were published as Lund. R.E., A study of the resources, people & economy of Southwestern Wyoming,1962, 112 pages. With coauthor Floyd K. Harmston, Director of the Division, we published a methods-level book, Application of an Input-Output Framework in a Community Economic System,1967, 125 pages, U. of Missouri Press. Research within the Division led me to another MS thesis titled "Some Evaluation of an Unbiased Ratio Estimator," and an MS in Statistics (1963).

With two MS degrees and a good record in research in hand, I was advanced in faculty rank to assistant professor and granted continuing tenure. My boss in the Division temporarily left UW to finish his PhD and I stepped into his place as acting director of the Division for 1963-64. It became my turn to start toward a PhD in statistics at Iowa State University (ISU) that fall.

Dr. Theodore A. Bancroft, Head of the Department of Statistics and Director of the Statistical Laboratory at ISU, directly handled all advising and paperwork for incoming graduate students. Looking over details for my time at UW, he suggested I try a new double major concept spanning both economics and statistics with qualifying exams applying to doctoral candidates in both fields. That was just what I wanted to do too! Of course I would need to “start over again” with at least a full year of courses now in advanced economics. I continued being supported by teaching assistantships in statistics. Two-thirds of my two years of coursework at ISU was in economics.

And then during that second fall, 1965, Dr. Bancroft brought a potential gift in the form of seven boxes of punched cards and other dusty research data related to eight weeks of meat purchases in 1963 by a panel of 624 families. The ISU Statistical Laboratory had designed the study and collected the data for the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station. An earlier funding source for data analysis had abandoned the project, but now Bancroft had a new sponsor. He expressed “your back-ground is equal to or better than anyone here on campus to complete an analysis and write up appropriate reports.” I moved into a three-fourths-time appointment in the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station. I could keep my current office in Statistics and continued teaching my assigned 400-level statistical methods course, carrying those students through their two-quarter sequence. By spring 1966 I was ready to look into the boxes. 

But then in December 1966, Dr. Bancroft brought me one more new “splendid opportunity that just fit my talents and experience!” ISU held a grant by the Ford Foundation to develop new graduate programs in statistics and agricultural economics at Mexico’s National Agricultural School. I looked up the location―just across the old Texcoco Lake bed northeast of Mexico City at Chapingo. The project paid for my tutoring in Spanish. My two years of high school language study finally proved valuable.

Over time a draft was finished for R.E. Lund, L.A. Duewer, W.R. Maki and N.V. Strand, Characteristics of Demand for Meat by Consumers in Webster County, Iowa, [Special Report 56, Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station, February 1968] and I flew to Chicago to give a presentation to sponsoring persons at the American Meat Institute. I wrote and defended my dissertation successfully in early June, Factors Affecting Consumer Demand for Meat, Webster County, Iowa,1967. My diploma was mailed to our home in Mexico.

I joined a team of three other young faculty members from ISU. We served as ISU-paid experienced visiting faculty, providing a modern U.S.-style teaching and research system, and perhaps more specifically, an ISU model. We taught courses, developed graduate curricula, assisted graduate students on their thesis research, and consulted with agricultural researchers on their statistical problems―all within our limited ability to speak Spanish. Occasionally we offered off-campus lectures at other colleges and at governmental research facilities. Our presence, and substituting in their place, enabled 6-8 regular Mexican faculty assigned to the new Graduate College to complete their PhDs at “recognized” universities, most at ISU and a couple at North Carolina State U.  

Finding a new job back in the States after two years away was difficult, but of high priority to Lillian and me in order to enroll our four children into a good U.S. school. I had arranged an interview trip for a new position located in central Iowa and went into the Ford Foundation offices in Mexico City to arrange air travel. Once there, I found a request from Dr. Lewis Barrett, head of the Department of Mathematics at MSU, asking me to come for an interview too.

Yes, I did arrive in Bozeman with a good offer in hand as an economist in Iowa, but instead chose to accept an appointment at MSU, — and thereby I chose to become a statistician, rather than an economist. I bought a new house, the one where we lived the past fifty years, and caught my flight back to Mexico — all in 24 hours of critical decision making! I have remained pleased with the outcome. I love the Bozeman community and I am overly proud to have been part of a competent Department of Mathematical Sciences within a distinguished University.

My appointment into the Department of Mathematics at MSU as a statistician began September 1969. While my position entailed typical duties expected for teaching and research, I saw my assignment to emphasize an upgrading of statistical methods in both teaching and consulting across the many disciplines at MSU. My name appeared on more than one hundred graduate student committees during that first decade. This assignment became part of the expected “outreach-service” of the Department.

My self-advancement reflected this mission through published statistical tables, computational algorithms, presentations at professional meetings, and perhaps most overtly by the computer package titled MSUSTAT in its many versions. Many coauthored publications, especially after starting an appointment as MAES Statistician in 1981, reflect my joint effort with persons in other disciplines. My appointment at MSU ended in 1995, the final three years being a one-third time phase-out.

Additional details about my time at MSU appear in greater detail in Statistics at MAES.

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Last revised: 2020-06-30