Bio: John Rolph

John E. Rolph recently retired as a professor of statistics at the Marshall School of Business of the University of Southern California, where he also held appointments in the mathematics department and the law school. Previously, he spent 24 years as a statistician at the Rand Corporation, 12 of them as head of the statistical research and consulting group.

His areas of expertise include statistics and public policy and empirical Bayes estimation. He served as a member of the National Research Council’s (NRC) Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) and as chair of the committee from 1998 to 2004; he has also served on the NRC Committee on Law and Justice. He has served on several NRC panels, on topics including statistical and operational test design in defense systems, methods for assessing discrimination, and decennial census methodology.

He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a lifetime national associate of the National Academies. He is a past editor of CHANCE magazine and has served in many other editorial capacities. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

John and his wife Elizabeth live on a vineyard in Paso Robles and have four grandchildren in San Luis Obispo.