Youden’s parents took him to the USA when he was seven. His first degree, at Rochester U, was in chemical engineering and his MSc and PhD (in 1924) were in chemistry at Columbia U. In 1928, whilst working in an institute for plant research, he came across Sir Ronald Fisher’s Statistical Methods, and this book engendered his subsequent interest in experimental design. During the Second World War he worked as a systems analyst. After the war, he joined the National Bureau of Standards, continuing to work on experimental design. He was the COPSS Fisher Lecturer in 1967. In 1969 he was awarded the Shewhart Medal of the ASQ and also received the Wilks Award of the ASA. He produced the diagram below which neatly encapsulates the view of Statistics held in the middle of the twentieth century:

http://www.amstat.org/about/statisticiansinhistory/bios/youdenwj.pdf Fuller biography and photograph.