According to the ASQ, the Brumbaugh Award, which has been presented since 1949, is given to “the paper making the largest single contribution to the development of industrial application of quality control.” The chosen paper is selected from among publications in the seven journals published by ASQ in a given year.

Wu’s award-winning paper, “CME Analysis: A New Method for Unraveling Aliased Effects in Two-level Fractional Factorial Experiments,” was co-authored by Heng Su (Ph.D. IE 15) and is based on Su’s ISyE dissertation. The paper tackles an important problem called “effect de-aliasing” – the disentangling of interaction effects from designed experimental data. This problem has been widely deemed as unsolvable within the design community since the 1940s. The Su-Wu paper presents a novel method for effect de-aliasing using the new concept of conditional main effects. This innovative approach can have great applicability in many aspects of engineering, allowing for improved understanding and modeling of physical processes from expensive experiments.

Wu will accept the Brumbaugh Award at ASQ’s World Conference, held in Seattle, Washington, at the end of April. This is the second time he has received the award, the first being in 1992.