Alan E. Gelfand is The James B Duke Professor of Statistical Science. He is currently chair of the Department of Statistical Science (DSS) and enjoys a secondary appointment as Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in the Nicholas School. Author of more than 200 papers (more than 140 since 1990) Gelfand is internationally known for his contributions to applied statistics, Bayesian computation and Bayesian inference. (An article in Science Watch found him to be the tenth most cited mathematical scientist in the world over the period 1991-2001). Gelfand is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He is a former President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis and in 2006, he received the Parzen Prize for a lifetime of research contribution to Statistics.
Gelfand's primary research focus for the past thirteen years has been in the area of statistical modeling for spatial and space-time data. Through a collection of more than sixty papers he has advanced methodology, using the Bayesian paradigm, to associate fully model-based inference with spatial and space-time data displays. His chief areas of application include environmental exposure, spatio-temporal ecological processes, and climatological modeling.