Andrew Gelman


Andrew Gelman is an American statistician, professor of statistics and political science, and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He earned an S.B. in mathematics and in physics from MIT in 1986 and a Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University in 1990 under the supervision of Donald Rubin.
He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association three times. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Personal life

Gelman married Caroline Rosenthal in 2002 and has three children.
The psychologist Susan Gelman is his older sister. The cartoonist Woody Gelman was his uncle.

Work

Gelman is currently a professor of political science and statistics at Columbia University, where he also directs the Applied Statistics Center. The Applied Statistics Center conducts research with several other departments at Columbia University, as well as containing a number of individual projects. Gelman is a practitioner of Bayesian statistics, and hierarchical models.
He is a major contributor to the statistical programming framework Stan.

Popular press

Gelman is notable for his efforts to make political science and statistics more accessible to journalists and to the public. He is one of the primary authors of The Monkey Cage, a Washington Post blog dedicated to providing informed commentary on politics and making political science more accessible.
Gelman also keeps his own blog which deals with statistical practices in social science. He frequently writes about Bayesian statistics, displaying data, and interesting trends in social science. According to The New York Times, on the blog "he posts his thoughts on best statistical practices in the sciences, with a frequent emphasis on what he sees as the absurd and unscientific... He is respected enough that his posts are well read; he is cutting enough that many of his critiques are enjoyed with a strong sense of schadenfreude."
He has been prominent as a critic of alleged poor methodological work in the replication crisis.