Kepner’s
Taft activities included the National Honor Society, Future Teachers of America,
Business Manager and Science Club.
Over the following decades, he has received awards for singularly best
performance on the PhD Qualifying Exam, on the PhD Comprehensive Exam, and
Outstanding Graduate Student award at The University of Iowa.
After joining the faculty at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, Kepner
received the SCSU Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to the
University, as well as the 1991 SCSU Outstanding Faculty Award for "substantive
contributions in improving the mathematics and statistics programs, commendable
scholarly activity, and development of a national reputation as a statistician",
and was a multiple year recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.
While teaching at the University of Florida, Kepner engaged in research both as
Co-Principal Investigator of the Children's Oncology Group (COG) Research Data
Center and Principal Investigator of the COG Research Data Center. In that
capacity, study designs he created for use in the medical setting of controlled
clinical trials are now applied in vastly different settings worldwide, such as
quality control sampling in virtually any industry and survey sampling.
Kepner joined the American Cancer Society's National Home Office and Emory
University in Atlanta, GA serving as Director, Division of Biostatistics/
Evaluation, Vice President, Statistics and Evaluation Center, and Adjunct
Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Rollins School of Public Health.