Eric D. Kolaczyk
President
Eric Kolaczyk is a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University, where he also serves as the inaugural director of the new Computational and Data Systems Initiative (CDSI). He was previously on faculty at Boston University, during which time he served as director of the Program in Statistics, the founding director of the department's MS in Statistical Practice (MSSP) program, and the director of the Hariri Institute for Computing. Previously he served as director of the
department's Program
in Statistics for over 15 years, and just recently stepped
down as founding director of the department's innovative MS in Statistical
Practice (MSSP) program. He is a founding member of Boston University's new
Faculty for Computing and Data
Science, and holds affiliated appointments with
the Division of Systems Engineering, the Bioinformatics Program, and the
Program in Computational Neuroscience.He obtained a BS degree in mathematics
from the University of Chicago, and MS and PhD degrees in statistics from
Stanford University. Before joining Boston University he was faculty in the
Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. He has been visiting
faculty at Harvard University, l'Universite d'Evry, and l'Universite Paris VII,
and he teaches an annual short-course at ENSAE / Paris-Saclay.
Prof. Kolaczyk has long chosen to focus his research efforts at the critical
point where statistical theory and methods support human endeavors enabled by
computing and engineering systems. He develops and incorporates aspects of
design, representation, modeling, inference, prediction, and uncertainty
quantification that are foundational to new paradigms for data measurement and
analysis and, ultimately, key to gaining insight into everything from health
and science to business and society. Much of that work for the past 15 years
has revolved around the statistical analysis of network-indexed data, and
includes both the development of basic methodology and inter-disciplinary work
with collaborators in bioinformatics, chemistry, computer science, geography,
neuroscience, and sociology. Besides various research articles on these topics,
he has also authored three books in this area, including Statistical Analysis
of Network Data: Methods and Models (Springer, 2009) and, joint with Gabor
Csardi, Statistical Analysis of Network Data in R (Springer, 2014). Prior to
his working in the area of networks, Prof. Kolaczyk spent a decade working on
statistical multi-scale modeling, with a particular focus on statistical signal
and image processing.
He is currently a member of the Data Science Steering Group, for the Institute
of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), and of the management committee for the
Astrostatistics Special Interest Group, for the International Statistical
Institute (ISI). Additionally, he recently completed a three-year period
serving as co-chair of the Data Science Post-secondary Education Roundtable,
sponsored by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences. Finally, he has served as
associate editor for 8 different journals under various societies, including
the ASA (i.e., JASA), IEEE, SIAM, and RSS (i.e., JRSS). He is an elected fellow
of the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (IMS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), an elected senior member of the Institute for Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and an elected member of the International
Statistical Institute (ISI).
