Florida State University’s Department of Statistics will welcome Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology and adjunct professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington Adrian Raftery for the annual Myles Hollander Distinguished Lectureship to discuss the development of new statistical methods for understanding climate change predictions. The event will take place on Wednesday, October 25 at 11 a.m. in the Kroto Auditorium at the Chemical Sciences Laboratory on FSU’s Tallahassee campus.

“Each Hollander lectureship is special because of the unique contributions of the lecturer,” said Elizabeth Slate, the Duncan McLean and Pearl Levine Fairweather professor of statistics. “Adrian Raftery is an internationally recognized leader in three fields: statistics, sociology and environmental sciences. His talk takes on the challenge of estimating the global temperature in the next 100 years, which is extremely impressive.”

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Adrian E. Raftery earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1976 and his master’s degree in statistics and operations research in 1977 at Trinity College in Dublin. He earned his doctoral degree in mathematical statistics in 1980 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France. He was a lecturer in statistics at Trinity College Dublin from 1980 to 1986, then joined the faculty in statistics and sociology at the University of Washington where he served as the founding director of the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences from 1999 to 2009. His research focuses on Bayesian model selection and Bayesian model averaging, model-based clustering, inference for deterministic simulation models, and the development of new statistical methods for demography, sociology, and the environmental and health sciences.

Raftery has published over 200 articles, edited three volumes of the annual Sociological Methodology compilation, co-edited “Statistics in the 21st Century” in 2002, and co-authored “Model-based Clustering and Classification for Data Science, with Applications in R” in 2019. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of the Sociological Research Association and honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

This year’s lectureship will cover probabilistic long-term forecasts of local average annual temperature changes related to climate change and global warming. Attendees will learn about the statistical methods developed by Raftery and his collaborators that offer forecasts for global average temperature change to the year 2100. This is crucial to understanding how common dangerously hot days are likely to be at any location by the end of the century and how we can best prepare for warmer times.

“The Myles Hollander Distinguished Lectureship enables the FSU statistics department to recognize and host an established leader and innovator in our field and to celebrate statistics as a discipline,” Slate said. “It gives our faculty and students a chance to set aside our myriad of diverse activities and focus on the contributions of one of the most eminent members in our field and, more deeply, the advanced research presented and discussed in the lecture that can teach us more about our own work.”

The Myles Hollander Distinguished Lectureship was established by Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor and statistics professor emeritus at Florida State University Myles Hollander, in appreciation of the university, its statistics department, and the statistics profession. The annual lectureship recognizes an internationally renowned leader and pioneering researcher in statistics who has made a sustained impact on the field, with lectures featuring topics that span the breadth of statistics.

To attend the 2023 Myles Hollander Distinguished Lectureship in-person or on Zoom, register at stats.fsu.edu.