Nationality American Alma mater Cornell University | Name Jim Berger Role Statistician | |
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Born 6 April 1950 (age 74)
Minneapolis, Minnesota ( 1950-04-06 ) Institutions Purdue University
Duke University Thesis Admissibility in Location Parameter Problems (1974) Doctoral students Mark Berliner
Ming-Hui Chen
Dipak K. Dey
Duncan Fong
Feng Liang
Peter Muller
Keying Ye
Man Suk Oh
James Scott
Dongchu Sun Known for Bayesian inference, Statistical hypothesis testing, Computer experiments Books Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis Awards R. A. Fisher Lectureship, Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada Fields Statistician, Bayesian inference | ||
Education Cornell University (1974) Doctoral advisor Lawrence D. Brown Residence United States of America | ||
James O. Berger (born April 6, 1950 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American statistician. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University in 1974. He was a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University until 1997, at which time he moved to the Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences (now the Department of Statistical Science) at Duke University, where he is currently the Arts and Sciences Professor of Statistics. He has also been Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute since 2002.
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Contributions to Science
Berger has worked on the decision theoretic bases of Bayesian inference, including advances on the Stein phenomenon during and after his thesis. He has also greatly contributed to advances in the so-called objective Bayes approach where prior distributions are constructed from the structure of the sampling distributions and/or of frequentist properties. He is also recognized for his analysis of the opposition between Bayesian and frequentist visions on testing statistical hypotheses, with criticisms of the use of p-values and critical levels.
Awards and honors
Berger has received numerous awards for his work: Guggenheim Fellowship, the COPSS Presidents' Award and the R. A. Fisher Lectureship. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by Purdue University.