Alan E. Gelfand

Bio: Alan E. Gelfand is the James B Duke Professor Emeritus of Statistical Science at Duke University. Author of more than 350 papers Gelfand is internationally known for his contributions to applied statistics, Bayesian computation and Bayesian inference. He has more than 50,000 citations and an h-index of 91. Gelfand is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. He is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He is a former President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. Among others, he has received the Parzen Prize (2006), the Distinguished Mahalanobis Lecturer Award (2012), the Distinguished Achievement Medal from the ASA Section on Statistics in the Environment (2013), the S. S. Wilks Memorial Award from the ASA (2019), the Chernoff Prize (2025), and a Doctor honoris causa from the University of Zaragoza. Gelfand’s primary research has been in the area of statistical modeling for spatial and space-time data. He has advanced Bayesian methodology to associate fully model-based inference with spatial and space-time data displays. His chief areas of application include environmental exposure, spatio-temporal ecological processes, and climate dynamics. He has four books in this area, including the successful “Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis for Spatial Data” with S. Banerjee and B. Carlin (third edition),