Sudipto Banerjee, professor and chair of the biostatistics department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, has been elected as president-elect of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. Banerjee will serve as the society’s president-elect in 2021, president in 2022 — including leading the society’s next planned world meeting in 2022 — and past-president in 2023.
“ISBA is an organization that is extremely close to my heart and one with which I have been associated since my student days,” Banerjee said. “Bayesian principles have played, and continue to play, a very important role in understanding the impact and spread of pandemics and have featured prominently in the epidemic models for COVID-19.”
Bayesian analysis casts statistical problems in the framework of decision-making. It entails formulating subjective prior probabilities to express preexisting information, careful modeling of the data structure, checking and allowing for uncertainty in model assumptions, formulating a set of possible decisions and a utility function to express how the value of each alternative decision is affected by the unknown model parameters. The influence of Bayesian statistics has extended to public health, astrophysics, meteorology and criminal justice policy.
Banerjee joined UCLA as professor and chair of the department of biostatistics in 2014. His research centers on statistical modeling and analysis of geographically referenced datasets, Bayesian statistics (theory and methods), and hierarchical modeling, statistical computing and related software development.
He was elected as a fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2018 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020. Banerjee is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and he holds elected fellowships in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. He has received a distinguished achievement medal from the American Statistical Association’s section on statistics and the environment and its outstanding statistical application award.
