George Casella

George Casella (January 22, 1951 – June 17, 2012) was a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida. He died from multiple myeloma.^[2]

George C. Casella
Born	(1951-01-22)January 22, 1951 The Bronx, New York City
Died	June 17, 2012(2012-06-17) (aged 61) Gainesville, Florida
Nationality	American
Education	Fordham University Purdue University
Scientific career
Fields	Statistics
Institutions	Rutgers University Cornell University University of Florida
Thesis	Minimax Ridge Regression Estimation (1977)
Doctoral advisor	Leon Jay Gleser[1]
Doctoral students	Lynn Eberly

Academic career

Casella completed his undergraduate education at Fordham University and graduate education at Purdue University. He served on the faculty of Rutgers University, Cornell University, and the University of Florida. His contributions focused on the area of statistics including Monte Carlo methods, model selection, and genomic analysis.^[2] He was particularly active in Bayesian and empirical Bayes methods, with works connecting with the Stein phenomenon, on assessing and accelerating the convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, as in his Rao–Blackwellization technique,^[3] and recasting lasso as Bayesian posterior mode estimation with independent Laplace priors.^[4]

Awards

Casella was named as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1988, and he was made an Elected Fellow of the International Statistical Institute in 1989. In 2009, he was made a Foreign Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences.^[5]

Selected bibliography

• Casella, George; Lehmann, E. L. (1998). Theory of point estimation. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98502-6.
• Lee Berger, Roger; Casella, George (2002). Statistical inference. Stamford, Connecticut: Thomson Learning. ISBN 0-534-24312-6.
• Casella, George; Robert, Christian P. (2004). Monte Carlo statistical methods. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 0-387-21239-6.
• McCulloch, Charles E.; Shayle R. Searle; Casella, George (2006). Variance components. New York: Wiley-Interscience. ISBN 0-470-00959-4.
• Casella, George (2008). Statistical design. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-75965-4.
• Casella, George; Robert, Christian P. (2009). Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R (Use R). Berlin: Springer. ISBN 978-1-4419-1575-7.
• Casella, George; Wu, Rongling; Changxing Ma (2010). Statistical Genetics of Quantitative Traits: Linkage, Maps and QTL (Statistics for Biology and Health). Berlin: Springer. ISBN 978-1-4419-1912-0.