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 ofCareer
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 byContributions 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 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 2015Selected 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