A Conversation with Stephen E. Fienberg

Abstract

Stephen E. Fienberg is Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with appointments in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department and the Heinz College. He is the Carnegie Mellon co-director of the Living Analytics Research Centre, a joint center between Carnegie Mellon University and Singapore Management University. Fienberg received his hon. B.Sc. in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Toronto (1964), and his A.M. (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) degrees in Statistics at Harvard University. He has served as Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon and as Vice President for Academic Affairs at York University in Toronto, Canada, as well as on the faculties of the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota. He was founding co-editor of Chance and served as the Coordinating and Applications Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. He is one of the founding editors of the Annals of Applied Statistics, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the new online Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality and founding editor of the new Annual Review of Statistics and its Application. He has been Vice President of the American Statistical Association and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. His research includes the development of statistical methods, especially tools for categorical data analysis and the analysis of network data, algebraic statistics, causal inference, statistics and the law, machine learning and the history of statistics. His work on confidentiality and disclosure limitation addresses issues related to respondent privacy in both surveys and censuses and especially to categorical data analysis. He is the author or editor of over 20 books and 400 papers and related publications. His 1975 book on categorical data analysis with Bishop and Holland, Discrete Multivariate Analysis: Theory and Practice, and his 1980 book on The Analysis of Cross-Classified Categorical Data are both citation classics. He served two terms as Chair of the Committee on National Statistics at the National Research Council (NRC) and is currently co-chair of the NAS-NRC Report Review Committee. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science, as well as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

The following conversation is based in part on a transcript of a 2009 interview funded by Pfizer Global Research-Connecticut, the American Statistical Association and the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut-Storrs as part of the “Conversations with Distinguished Statisticians in Memory of Professor Harry O. Posten.”