  Alan E. Gelfand was born April 17, 1945, in the Bronx, New York. He attended
public grade schools and did his undergraduate work at what was then called
City College of New York (CCNY, now CUNY), excelling at mathematics. He then
surprised and saddened his mother by going all the way across the country to
Stanford to graduate school, where he completed his dissertation in 1969 under
the direction of Professor Herbert Solomon, making him an academic grandson of
Herman Rubin and Harold Hotelling. Alan then accepted a faculty position at the
University of Connecticut (UConn) where he was promoted to tenured associate
professor in 1975 and to full professor in 1980. A few years later he became
interested in decision theory, then empirical Bayes, which eventually led to
the publication of Gelfand and Smith [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 85 (1990)
398-409], the paper that introduced the Gibbs sampler to most statisticians and
revolutionized Bayesian computing. In the mid-1990s, Alan's interests turned
strongly to spatial statistics, leading to fundamental contributions in
spatially-varying coefficient models, coregionalization, and spatial boundary
analysis (wombling). He spent 33 years on the faculty at UConn, retiring in
2002 to become the James B. Duke Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences
at Duke University, serving as chair from 2007-2012. At Duke, he has continued
his work in spatial methodology while increasing his impact in the
environmental sciences. To date, he has published over 260 papers and 6 books;
he has also supervised 36 Ph.D. dissertations and 10 postdocs. This interview
was done just prior to a conference of his family, academic descendants, and
colleagues to celebrate his 70th birthday and his contributions to statistics
which took place on April 19-22, 2015 at Duke University.
