Odd Olai Aalen (born 6 May 1947, in

Oslo Oslo ( , , or ; sma, Oslove) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of ...

) is a Norwegian

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 a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

at the Department of Biostatistics at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the

University of Oslo The University of Oslo ( no, Universitetet i Oslo; la, Universitas Osloensis) is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the highest ranked and oldest university in Norway. It is consistently ranked among the top universit ...

Life

Aalen completed his

examen artium Examen artium was the name of the academic certification conferred in Denmark and Norway, qualifying the student for admission to university studies. Examen artium was originally introduced as the entrance exam of the University of Copenhagen in 1 ...

in 1966 at

Oslo Cathedral School Schola Osloensis, known in Norwegian language, Norwegian as Oslo Katedralskole (''Oslo Cathedral School'') and more commonly as "Katta",

before studying first mathematics and physics and then statistics in which he graduated at the

in 1972.

Work

His research work is geared towards applications in

bioscience ''BioScience'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. It was established in 1964 and was preceded by the ''AIBS Bulletin'' (1951–19 ...

s. Aalen's early work on

counting process A counting process is a stochastic process with values that are non-negative, integer, and non-decreasing: # ''N''(''t'') ≥ 0. # ''N''(''t'') is an integer. # If ''s'' ≤ ''t'' then ''N''(''s'') ≤ ''N''(''t''). If ''s'' < ''t'', then ''N''(' ...

es and martingales, starting with his 1976 Ph.D. thesis at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, has had profound influence in

biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experime ...

. Inferences for fundamental quantities associated with cumulative hazard rates, in

survival analysis Survival analysis is a branch of statistics for analyzing the expected duration of time until one event occurs, such as death in biological organisms and failure in mechanical systems. This topic is called reliability theory or reliability analysi ...

and models for analysis of event histories, are typically based on the Nelson–Aalen estimator or appropriate related statistics. The Nelson–Aalen estimator is related to the Kaplan-Meier estimator and generalisations thereof. Aalen is currently professor emeritus at the Oslo Centre for Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Faculty of Medicine at the

Honors and awards

He is an elected member of the

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters ( no, Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi, DNVA) is a learned society based in Oslo, Norway. Its purpose is to support the advancement of science and scholarship in Norway. History The Royal Frederick Univer ...

References

External links

*
The BMMS Centre

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aalen, Odd Olai 1947 births Living people Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Norwegian statisticians University of Oslo faculty University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Oslo alumni People educated at Oslo Cathedral School Norwegian expatriates in the United States Fellows of the American Statistical Association