Pranab K. Sen Obituary

January 20, 2024

Pranab K. Sen

November 07, 1937 – December 31, 2023

Mathematician and longtime biostatistics Professor Pranab K. Sen died on Dec. 31, 2023 at the age of 86 in his home, surrounded by his family, in Chapel Hill, NC.

Professor Sen is widely regarded as a pioneer of nonparametric statistics. He earned a B.Sc. in 1955, an M.Sc. in 1957 and a Ph.D. in statistics in 1962, all from the University of Calcutta. He taught at the University of Calcutta and the University of California at Berkeley, before joining the Biostatistics faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1965. Professor Sen was appointed a joint faculty member in the Statistics Department in 1988 and remained at UNC until his retirement in 2017.

Professor Sen was the founding co-editor of two journals, Sequential Analysis and Statistics and Decisions; and was joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference from 1980 to 1983. He is the author or co-author of 11 books on nonparametric statistics, the advisor to 85 Ph.D. students and the author of 659 research publications. His work has been cited thousands of times in fields ranging from oceanography to climate to agriculture.

More information can be found in a news release by the School of Public Health