Terence Paul "Terry" Speed (born 14 March 1943 in Victor Harbor,

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

FAA The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the largest transportation agency of the U.S. government and regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the country as well as over surrounding international waters. Its powers include air traffic m ...

FRS is an Australian statistician. A senior principal research scientist at the

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research WEHI (), previously known as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, is Australia's oldest medical research institute. Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who won the Nobel Prize in 1960 for ...

, he is known for his contributions to the

analysis of variance Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a collection of statistical models and their associated estimation procedures (such as the "variation" among and between groups) used to analyze the differences among means. ANOVA was developed by the statistician ...

and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.

Early life and education

Terry Speed was born in Victor Harbor, in

, and grew up in

Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...

. In 1961, he started a joint degree in medicine and science at the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb no ...

, but later focussed on science only, obtaining a honours degree in mathematics and statistics in 1964. Speed obtained a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from

Monash University Monash University () is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named for prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university h ...

in 1968 with a thesis titled ''Some topics in the theory of distributive lattices'' under the supervision of Peter D. Finch.

Career

After his PhD, Terry Speed took a lecturing position in

Sheffield Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire a ...

(

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

), at the Manchester-Sheffield School of Probability and Statistics. In 1974, he returned to Australia, becoming assistant professor at the

University of Western Australia The University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Perth, the state capital, with a secondary campus in Albany and various other facilitie ...

, heading the statisticians in the department of mathematics. He then became professor in 1975 and head of department in 1982. In 1984, Terry Speed became chief of the division of mathematics and statistics at CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. After a two month visit in the department of statistics 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 ...

in 1984, he applied for a permanent position and became a tenured professor there in 1987. In 1996,

Suzanne Cory Suzanne Cory (born 11 March 1942) is an Australian molecular biologist. She has worked on the genetics of the immune system and cancer and has lobbied her country to invest in science. She is married to fellow scientist Jerry Adams, also a W ...

, director of the

(WEHI), in

and former high-school classmate of Speed, invited him to start a bioinformatics group at the institute. Starting in 1997, he shared his time between the two institutions. In 2009, he retired from the

, while keeping academic collaborations with the university, including the supervision of PhD students and postdocs. He started working full time at WEHI, where he was head of the Bioinformatics division until 31 August 2014, and has remained a laboratory head since then. He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the

Infosys Prize The Infosys Prize is an annual award given to scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin (not necessarily born in India) by the Infosys Science Foundation and ranks among the highest monetary awards in India to r ...

in 2009 and 2010. In 2016, a former colleague and a former post-doctoral researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, filed a complaint of sexual harassment against Speed, with the allegedly infringing behavior occurring in 2002. Speed has supervised at least 72 research students.

Notable work

Terry Speed has contributed to a wide range of subjects, including

distributive lattice In mathematics, a distributive lattice is a lattice in which the operations of join and meet distribute over each other. The prototypical examples of such structures are collections of sets for which the lattice operations can be given by set ...

ring theory In algebra, ring theory is the study of rings—algebraic structures in which addition and multiplication are defined and have similar properties to those operations defined for the integers. Ring theory studies the structure of rings, their r ...

and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.

Expert witness

Speed was an

expert witness An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as ...

for the defense of O.J. Simpson at the trial for the

O. J. Simpson murder case ''The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson'' was a criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court starting in 1994, in which O. J. Simpson, a former National Football League (NFL) player, broadcaster and actor, was ...

, as well as an expert witness in the Imanishi-Kari case, an affair of alleged

scientific misconduct Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research. A '' Lancet'' review on ''Handling of Scientific Misconduct in Scandinavian countrie ...

which involved biologist

David Baltimore David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technol ...

. Much earlier in his career, he was an expert defence witness in the 1966 trial of

Ronald Ryan Ronald Joseph Ryan (21 February 1925 – 3 February 1967) was the last person to be legally executed in Australia. Ryan was found guilty of shooting and killing warder George Hodson during an escape from Pentridge Prison, Victoria, in 1965. ...

, the last person executed in Australia; however, his evidence that Ryan must have been at least 2.55 metres tall (he was only 1.73 metres) to fire the fatal shot failed to sway the jury.

Awards and honours

In 1989 Speed was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

. Speed was

president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics The president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics is the highest officer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), and, together with the president-elect and past president, sets the directions for IMS during his or her term of of ...

in 2004. In 2002, he received the

Pitman Pitman may refer to: * A coal miner, particularly in Northern England * Pitman (surname) * Pitman, New Jersey, United States * Pitman, Pennsylvania, United States * Pitman, Saskatchewan, Canada * Pitman Shorthand, a system of shorthand * Pitman ar ...

medal. In 2009 he was awarded a NHMRC Australia Fellowship. On 30 October 2013, he received the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Science. Speed was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

(FRS) of London in 2013. His nomination reads:

Personal life

Speed married Freda Elizabeth (Sally) Pollard in 1964.

References

External links

Interview with Terry Speed
by

Jean Yang Jean Yee Hwa Yang is an Australian statistician known for her work on variance reduction for microarrays, and for inferring proteins from mass spectrometry data. Yang is a Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of ...

. Amstat News, 1 September 2016. {{DEFAULTSORT:Speed, Terry 1943 births Living people Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science Australian Fellows of the Royal Society Australian statisticians Australian bioinformaticians WEHI alumni Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the American Statistical Association WEHI staff