Abstract

Nan M. Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Biostatistics (Emerita) at Harvard University. During her more than forty years on the faculty, she developed many simple and practical statistical methods for pressing public health and medical problems. She has received numerous awards including the 2011 Samuel S. Wilks Award from the American Statistical Association, the 25th Annual Lowell Reed Lecturer from the American Public Health Association in 2011, and the 2015 Marvin Zelen Award for Leadership in the Statistical Sciences. She was recently awarded the third International Prize in Statistics in 2021. She is one of the top cited authors in the field and has co-authored two books - one on longitudinal data and one on statistical genetics which are widely used as textbooks.

She is well-known for her contributions in longitudinal data, missing data and meta-analysis. Her seminal work on the EM algorithm with Dempster and Rubin is well-renowned and not only used widely in Statistical inference, missing data and Statistical Genetics, but also in modern day Machine Learning. In this talk we will discuss about her work on EM algorithm.