The D.D. Mason Faculty Award is named for Dr. David D. Mason who served as Professor of Statistics at NCSU from 1953 until he retired in 1981. From 1963 through 1981 Dr. Mason served as Department Head. Among his many accomplishments as department head, Dr. Mason guided the establishment and growth of the SAS project while it was in the Department of Statistics, NCSU. The project led to the development of widely used SAS computer products and spun-off the SAS Institute in Cary, NC. Dr. Mason served as chair of the Board of Directors of the Triangle University Computing Center (TUCC) that brought state-of-the-art computing to NCSU, UNC and Duke in the 1960's and helped attract IBM to the Research Triangle area. He also chaired the Committee on Statistics of the Southern Regional Education Board.
