Stats + Stories

Megan Price is the executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and designs strategies and methods for statistical analysis of human rights data for projects in a variety of locations including Guatemala, Colombia, and Syria. She has contributed analyses submitted as evidence in two court cases in Guatemala and has served as the lead statistician and author on three UN reports documenting deaths in Syria. Megan is a member of the Technical Advisory Board for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, on the Board of Directors for Tor, and a Research Fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Human Rights Science. She is the Human Rights Editor for the Statistical Journal of the International Association for Official Statistics (IAOS) and on the editorial board of Significance Magazine. Before she was executive director at HRDAG, Megan was the director of research there.

Stephen T. Ziliak is Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University and Conjoint Professor of Business and Law at the University of Newcastle-Australia. A major contributor to the American Statistical Association “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values” (2016) he is probably best known for his book (with Deirdre N. McCloskey) on The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008), showing the damage done by a culture of mindless significance testing, the history of wrong turns, and the benefits which could be enjoyed by returning to Bayesian and Guinnessometric roots.

Brad Efron is Max H. Stein Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, and Professor of Biostatistics with the Department of Biomedical Data Science in the Stanford School of Medicine; he serves as Co-director of the undergraduate Mathematical and Computational Sciences Program administered by the Department of Statistics. He has held visiting faculty appointments at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Imperial College, London. He has been recognized with the 2018 International Prize in Statistics.

Jonny Jacobsen is a Paris based English journalist. Studying for an MA in Data Journalism. Still tracking French politics, culture, international affairs.

Mark Hansen is a professor of journalism where he also serves as the Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Founded in 2012, the Brown Institute is a bi-coastal collaboration between Columbia Journalism School and the School of Engineering at Stanford University -- its mission is to explore the interplay between technology and story. 

Prior to joining Columbia, Hansen was a Professor in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. In addition to his technical work, Hansen also has an active art practice involving the presentation of data for the public. His work with the Office for Creative Research has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the London Science Museum, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and the lobbies of the New York Times building and the Public Theater (permanent displays) in Manhattan. Hansen holds a BS in Applied Math from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD and MA in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Matt Dempsey is the data editor at the Houston Chronicle. He worked on projects involving wildfires, state pensions, and the chemical industry. His passion for public records frequently leads to disclosure of data from all levels of government. His series Chemical Breakdown won the 2016 IRE Innovation award and the National Press Foundation's "Feddie" award. His work was a key part of the Chronicle's Pulitzer Prize finalist entry for Breaking News.

Mark Glickman, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, is Senior Lecturer on Statistics at Harvard University, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a VA Center of Innovation.  He is well-known for his work in games and sports, having created the Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems that are widely used in online gaming.  Mark co-organizes the biannual New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports, has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, and has been the chair of the US Chess Ratings Committee since 1992.  More recently, Mark has embarked on projects in music analytics.  His work on authorship attribution of Lennon-McCartney songs has received widespread media coverage.

Tripp Eldridge is a host and member of the Cincinnati Public Radio station WVXU which producers his weekly show Start Hear where he plays the role of "Podcast Jockey" to introduce his audience to new national and local podcasts.

Andreas V. Georgiou is an economist with specializations in Monetary Theory and Stabilization Policy and in International Trade and Finance. After working for the International Monetary Fund, he returned to Greece in 2010 to head the newly established Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT)-the successor of the National Statistical Service of Greece following the onset of the economic crisis in Greece. He was President of the Hellenic Statistical Authority for 5 years. He worked to re-organize and rebuild the institution, on a new basis of fully conforming to international and European statistical standards and practices, leading to the establishment of the credibility of Greek statistics. He is an elected Member of the International Statistical Institute . He has been a Visiting Associate Professor in Finance, Banking and Investment, at the Economics University Bratislava, Slovak Republic, and a Visiting Lecturer at Amherst College. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Amherst College.

For more information on the Explaining Bayes contest submit your entry at statsandstories.net/betterbayes and tweet @statsandstories with the #BetterBayes.

Kerrie Mengersen (@KerrieMengersen) is Distinguished Professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, and past-President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) . Her research spans Bayesian statistics, computational statistics, environmental, genetic and health statistics.