Research Summary
History
I trained in probability and statistics under the tutelage of Persi Diaconis at Harvard University,
graduating with my PhD in 1996. My dissertation generalized methods in
empirical process theory to maximum problems for stochastic processes
arising from sorting and storage problems. I spent two years as a
postdoc in the Graduiertenkolleg for Probability, based at the Technical University of Berlin,
where I produced work on random dynamical systems, including iterated
function systems and stochastic flows. From there, I went to the
department of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Informatics at the Technical University of Delft, where I spent half a year as a postdoc in mathematical statistics with Piet Groeneboom.
The next 2 1/2 years were spent on teaching and research as Jerzy Neyman Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California -- Berkeley, where I further developed my interest in statistics, and particularly demography. This led me to switch to the Demography Department at Berkeley, where I was hired for four years under a K12 grant from the US National Institute on Aging. There I worked with Ken Wachter and Steve Evans,
among others, developing new statistical and probabilistic methods for
working with new experimental data and new theories of biological
aging. Since 2005 I have been associate professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of Queen's University.
Current Research program: Stochastic biodemography
Over the past twenty years, a fertile discussion has begun between
demographers and biologists over the description and explanation of
life histories, in humans and other species. New experiments and new
theories have burst the traditional mathematical demography toolkit. In
particular, modern stochastic processes and statistical methodology
were little known among experimentalists and theorists grappling with
problems such as:
- The evolution of populations accumulating mutations whose deleterious effects are age-specific;
- Growth rates of populations in random environments;
- The effects of individual-level variability (whether fixed or developing in time) on population-level mortality rates;
- Identifying and explaining plateaus in mortality rates at advanced ages;
- Modeling the effects of random damage accumulation on individual survival.
I also continue to work on problems of random dynamical systems, some of which also find application in biodemography.