Title: Professor

Email: kass at stat.cmu.edu

Webpage: http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~kass/

Research Interests:

I am interested in all aspects of statistical methods in neuroscience. Most of my work has involved analysis of neural spike train data, but I am also supervising several students working on MEG, fMRI and diffusion imaging, and I hope to learn about statistical issues in applying other neuroscience technologies.

Bio:

Rob Kass received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Chicago in 1980. His early work formed the basis for his book Geometrical Foundations of Asymptotic Inference, co-authored with Paul Vos. His subsequent research has been in Bayesian inference and, since 2001, in the application of statistics to neuroscience. Kass is known not only for his methodological contributions, but also for several major review articles, including one on Bayes factors (JASA, 1995, with Adrian Raftery), one on prior distributions (JASA, 1996, with Larry Wasserman), and a pair on statistics in neuroscience (Nature Neuroscience, 2004, with Emery Brown and Partha Mitra; J. Neurophysiology, 2005, with Emery Brown and Valerie Ventura). Kass has served as Chair of the Section for Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association, Chair of the Statistics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Executive Editor of the international review journal Statistical Science, and founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Bayesian Analysis. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the 10 most highly cited researchers, 1995-2005., in the category of mathematics. Kass has been been on the faculty of the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon since 1981 and served as Department Head from 1995 to 2004; he joined the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in 1997, and the Machine Learning Department in 2007.