Hotelling Lectures to be presented by Aad van der Vaart
February 23, 2017This year's Hotelling Lectures will be presented by Aad van der Vaart, Professor and Scientific Director of the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. The subject will be Nonparametric Bayesian methods: frequentist analysis.
Aad van der Vaart studied mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Leiden, and received a PhD in mathematics from this university in 1987. He held positions in College Station, Texas and Paris (not in Texas), held a Miller fellowship in Berkeley, and was visiting professor in Berkeley, Harvard and Seattle. Following a long connection to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam he is currently Professor of Stochastics at Leiden University. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research has been funded by NWO, VU-USF, STW, CMSB, NDNS+, STAR, and most recently by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant, 2012). He received the C.J. Kok prize in 1988, the van Dantzig award in 2000, and the NWO Spinoza Prize in 2015.
Aad van der Vaart's research is in statistics and probability, as mathematical disciplines and in their applications to other sciences, with an emphasis on statistical models with large parameter spaces. He wrote books and lecture notes (on topics such as empirical processes, time series, stochastic integration, option pricing, statistical genetics, statistical learning, Bayesian nonparametrics), as well as research papers. See research page for more information.
Aad van der Vaart was associate editor of the Annals of Statistics, Statistica Neerlandica, Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincare, Probability Theory and Related Fields, co-editor of Statistics and Decisions, and is currently associate editor of Indagationes Mathematicae, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference and ALEA. Keynote lectures include the Forum Lectures at the EMS 2009, the Le Cam lecture at the JSM 2009, invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, and a foundational lecture at the world meeting of International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2012. He was program chair for the European Meeting of Statisticians 2006 in Oslo and BNP10 (2015) in Raleigh, and local chair of BNP9 and European Meeting of Statisticians 2015.
Among former administrative functions are president of the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research (2003-07), head of the Department of Mathematics of VU University (2002-06), chair of the European Council of the Bernoulli Society, scientific chair of the Stieltjes Institute, chair of the mathematics board of the Lorentz Centre, board member of the NDNS+ and STAR clusters, and council member of the International Statistical Institute. He is currently council member of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and member of the steering committee of the Statistical Science master in Leiden. Since September 2015 he is Scientific Director of the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University.
The Hotelling Lectures are an annual event in the Department of Statistics & Operations Research at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, honoring the memory of Professor Harold Hotelling, our first chairman. This year we are honored to have Professor Aad van der Vaart from Leiden University deliver our two Hotelling lectures which are open to the public. See our upcoming events for details about times and locations.