Alan E. Gelfand (born April 17, 1945) is an American

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

, and is currently the

James B. Duke Professor At Duke University, the title of James B. Duke Professor is given to a small number of the faculty with extraordinary records of achievement. At some universities, titles like "distinguished professor", "institute professor", or " regents professo ...

of Statistics and Decision Sciences at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. Gelfand’s research includes substantial contributions to the fields of Bayesian statistics, spatial statistics and hierarchical modeling.

Early life and education

Alan E. Gelfand was born in Bronx, NY. After graduating from the public school system at the young age of 16, Gelfand attended the City College of New York (now the City University of New York; CUNY) as an undergraduate where he excelled in mathematics. Gelfand’s matriculation to graduate school symbolized both a physical and educational transition as he moved cross-country to attend Stanford University and pursue a Ph.D. in Statistics. He finished his dissertation in 1969 on seriation methods (chronological sequencing) under the direction of

Herbert Solomon Herbert Solomon (March 13, 1919 – September 20, 2004) was an American statistician. He was a professor emeritus of statistics at Stanford University and co-founder of the university's statistics department. He earned a bachelor's degree from t ...

Career

Gelfand accepted an offer from the University of Connecticut where he spent 33 years as a professor. In 2002, he moved to Duke University as the James B. Duke Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences.

Gelfand and Smith (1990)

After attending a short course taught by Adrian Smith at Bowling Green State University, Gelfand decided to take a sabbatical to Nottingham, UK with the intention of working on using numerical methods to solve empirical Bayes problems. After studying Tanner and Wong (1987) and being hinted as to its connection to Geman and Geman (1984) by

David Clayton David George Clayton (born 13 June 1944), is a British statistician and epidemiologist. He is titular Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Principal Research Fello ...

, Gelfand was able to realize the computational value of replacing expensive numerical techniques with Monte Carlo sampling-based methods in Bayesian inference. Published as Gelfand and Smith (1990), Gelfand described how the Gibbs sampler can be used for Bayesian inference in a computationally efficient manner. Since its publication, the general methods described in Gelfand and Smith (1990) has revolutionized data analysis allowing previously intractable problems to now be tractable. To date, the paper has been cited over 7500 times.

Contributions to spatial statistics

In 1994, Gelfand was presented with a dataset that he had previously not encountered: scallop catches on the Atlantic Ocean. Intrigued by the challenges associated with analyzing data with structured spatial correlation, Gelfand, along with colleagues

Sudipto Banerjee Sudipto Banerjee (born October 23, 1972) is an Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and inference for spatial data analysis. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the ...

and Brad Carlin, created an inferential paradigm for analyzing spatial data. Gelfand’s contributions to spatial statistics include spatially-varying coefficient models, linear models of coregionalization for multivariate spatial processes, predictive processes for analysis of large spatial data and non-parametric approaches to the analysis of spatial data. Gelfand's research in spatial statistics spans application areas of ecology, disease and the environment.

Awards and recognitions

* Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, May 1978 * Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, 1986 * Elected Member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 1995 * Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, August 1996 * Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award, February 2001 * Tenth Most Cited Mathematical Scientist in the World 1991-2001 * Science Watch President, International Society for Bayesian Analysis, 2006 * Recipient, Parzen Prize, 2006 * Distinguished Research Medal, ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment, 2013 * Elected Fellow, International Society for Bayesian Analysis, November 2015

Selected Publications (in Reverse Chronological Order)

* Banerjee, S., Carlin, B. P., & Gelfand, A. E. (2014). ''Hierarchical modeling and analysis for spatial data''. CRC Press. * * * Gelfand, A. E., Diggle, P., Guttorp, P., & Fuentes, M. (Eds.). (2010). ''Handbook of spatial statistics''. CRC press. * * * * * * Gelfand, A. E., & Dey, D. K. (1994). Bayesian model choice: asymptotics and exact calculations. ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological)'', 501-514. * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gelfand, Alan Enoch Living people Duke University faculty American statisticians Place of birth missing (living people) Fellows of the American Statistical Association People from the Bronx 1945 births Spatial statisticians University of Connecticut faculty City University of New York alumni Stanford University alumni