Nan Laird

Nan M. Laird is a professor in Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.^[1]

Research

Laird received her PhD from Harvard University in 1975 under Arthur Dempster.

Laird is well known for many seminal papers in biostatistics applications and methods, including the Expectation-maximization algorithm. She is a highly cited author according to the ISI Web of Knowledge.

Honors

Her honors include the Purdue University Myra Samuels Lecturer award (2004), the Janet L. Norwood Award (2003) and F.N. David Award (2001) from the American Statistical Association, and several other fellowships.

Publications

• A. P. Dempster, N. M. Laird and D. B. Rubin. (1977). "Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, B, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 1-38. (The authors collected a variety of maximum likelihood problems and methods of solving these problems that occurred in the literature. They found that all of these methods had some ideas in common and they named it the EM Algorithm, standing for "Expectation, Maximization".)

References

External links

• Nan Laird at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Nan Laird at Harvard School of Public Health
• Nan Laird at ISI Web of Knowledge