Odd Aalen


Odd Olai Aalen is a Norwegian statistician and a professor at the Department of Biostatistics at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Oslo.

Life

Aalen completed his examen artium in 1966 at Oslo Cathedral School before studying first mathematics and physics and then statistics in which he graduated at the University of Oslo in 1972.

Work

His research work is geared towards applications in biosciences. Aalen's early work on counting processes and martingales, starting with his 1976 Ph.D. thesis at the University of California, Berkeley, has had profound influence in biostatistics. Inferences for fundamental quantities associated with cumulative hazard rates, in survival analysis and models for analysis of event histories, are typically based on the Nelson–Aalen estimator or appropriate related statistics. The Nelson–Aalen estimator is related to the Kaplan-Meier estimator and generalisations thereof.
Aalen is currently the leader of the Centre for Biostatistical Modelling in the Medical Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo.

Honors and awards

He is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.