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Dr. James O. Berger received his PhD of Mathematics from Cornell University in 1974, five years after he left high school. He received his tenure two years after he joined the faculty of Statistics at Purdue University and was promoted to full professor in 1980. In 1985, he became Richard M. Brumfield Distinguish Professor of Statistics at Purdue University . Since 1997, he has been Arts and Science Distinguish Professor of Statistics at Duke University . Currently he is also the director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Science Institute.

Berger was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1995-1996, chair of the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association in 1995, and president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis during 2004. He has been involved with numerous editorial activities, including co-editorship of the Annals of Statistics (the landmark journal in the statistical society) during the period 1998-2000, and has organized or participated in the organization of over 35 conferences. He has also served on numerous statistical administrative and program committees, including the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Research Council. Berger has also been on various university and NSF site visit terms and panels.

Among the awards and honors, Berger has received are Guggenheim and Sloan Fellowships, the COPSS President's Award (an award for excellent researcher in statistics who is younger than 40) in 1985, the Sigma Xi Research Award at Purdue University for contribution of the year to science in 1993, the Fisher Lectureship in 2001, election as foreign member of the Spanish Real Academia de Ciencias in 2002, election to the USA National Academy of Sciences in 2003, award of an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Purdue University in 2004, and the Wald Lectureship in 2007.

Berger's research has primarily been in Bayesian statistics, foundations of statistics, statistical decision theory, simulation, model selection, and various interdisciplinary areas of science and industry, especially astronomy and the interface between computer modeling and statistics. He has supervised 31 Ph.D. dissertations, published over 160 articles and has written or edited 14 books or special volumes. Berger has organized 28 international Statistics meetings including the famous series of Purdue Symposium on Statistical Decision Theory and Related Topics and the Valencia International Meeting on Bayesian Statistics.

More information see Dr. Berger's home page: http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger