Adrian Raftery

Who is Adrian Raftery?

Adrian E. Raftery is an Irish and American statistician.

He is the Blumstein-Jordan Professor of Statistics and Sociology, and founding Director of the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. He studied mathematics and statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and obtained his doctorate in mathematical statistics in 1980 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France, advised by Paul Deheuvels. From 1980 to 1986 he was a lecturer in statistics at Trinity College Dublin, and since then he has been on the faculty of the University of Washington. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2009. He was identified as the world's most cited researcher in mathematics for the decade 1995-2005 by Thomson-ISI.

As of 2009, Raftery has written or coauthored over 150 articles in scholarly journals. His research has focused on the development of new statistical methods, particularly for the social, environmental and health sciences. He has been a leader in developing methods for Bayesian model selection and Bayesian model averaging, and model-based clustering, as well as inference from computer simulation models. He has recently developed new methods for probabilistic weather forecasting and probabilistic population projections.