The Statistics Debate!

About the Participants

Dan Jeske (moderator) received MS and PhD degrees from the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University in 1982 and 1985, respectively. He was a distinguished member of technical staff, and a technical manager at AT&T Bell Laboratories between 1985-2003. Concurrent with those positions, he was a visiting part-time lecturer in the Department of Statistics at Rutgers University. Since 2003, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) serving as Chair of the department 2008-2015. He is currently the Vice Provost of Academic Personnel and the Vice Provost of Administrative Resolution at UCR. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Statistician, an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and is President-elect of the International Society for Statistics in Business and Industry.. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and is a co-inventor on 10 U.S. Patents. He served a 3-year term on the Board of Directors of ASA in 2013-2015.  

Jim Berger is the Arts and Sciences Professor of Statistics at Duke University. His current research interests include Bayesian model uncertainty and uncertainty quantification for complex computer models. Berger was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1995-1996 and of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis during 2004. He was the founding director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, serving from 2002-2010. He was co-editor of the Annals of Statistics from 1998-2000 and was a founding editor of the Journal on Uncertainty Quantification from 2012-2015. Berger received the COPSS `President's Award’ in 1985, was the Fisher Lecturer in 2001, the Wald Lecturer of the IMS in 2007, and received the Wilks Award from the ASA in 2015. He was elected as a foreign member of the Spanish Real Academia de Ciencias in 2002, elected to the USA National Academy of Sciences in 2003, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Purdue University in 2004, and became an Honorary Professor at East China Normal University in 2011.

Deborah G. Mayo is professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech. Her Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge won the 1998 Lakatos Prize in philosophy of science. She is a research associate at the London School of Economics: Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). She co-edited (with A. Spanos) Error and Inference (2010, CUP). Her most recent book is Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (2018, CUP). She founded the Fund for Experimental Reasoning, Reliability and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science (E.R.R.O.R) which sponsored a 2 week summer seminar in Philosophy of Statistics in 2019 for 15 faculty in philosophy, psychology, statistics, law and computer science (co-directed with A. Spanos). She publishes widely in philosophy of science, statistics, and philosophy of experiment. She blogs at errorstatistics.com and phil-stat-wars.com.  

David Trafimow is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the New Mexico State University.  His research area is social psychology.  In particular his research looks at social cognition especially in understanding how self-cognitions are organized, and the interrelations between self-cognitions and presumed determinants of behavior (e.g., attitudes, subjective norms, control beliefs, and behavioral intentions). His research interests include cognitive structures and processes underlying attributions and memory for events and persons. Additionally, he is also involved in methodological, statistical, and philosophical issues pertaining to science.