  Richard Olshen was born in Portland, Oregon, on May 17, 1942. Richard spent
his early years in Chevy Chase, Maryland, but has lived most of his life in
California. He received an A.B. in Statistics at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1963, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Yale University in 1966,
writing his dissertation under the direction of Jimmie Savage and Frank
Anscombe. He served as Research Staff Statistician and Lecturer at Yale in
1966-1967. Richard accepted a faculty appointment at Stanford University in
1967, and has held tenured faculty positions at the University of Michigan
(1972-1975), the University of California, San Diego (1975-1989), and Stanford
University (since 1989). At Stanford, he is Professor of Health Research and
Policy (Biostatistics), Chief of the Division of Biostatistics (since 1998) and
Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering and of Statistics. At various
times, he has had visiting faculty positions at Columbia, Harvard, MIT,
Stanford and the Hebrew University. Richard's research interests are in
statistics and mathematics and their applications to medicine and biology. Much
of his work has concerned binary tree-structured algorithms for classification,
regression, survival analysis and clustering. Those for classification and
survival analysis have been used with success in computer-aided diagnosis and
prognosis, especially in cardiology, oncology and toxicology. He coauthored the
1984 book Classification and Regression Trees (with Leo Brieman, Jerome
Friedman and Charles Stone) which gives motivation, algorithms, various
examples and mathematical theory for what have come to be known as CART
algorithms. The approaches to tree-structured clustering have been applied to
problems in digital radiography (with Stanford EE Professor Robert Gray) and to
HIV genetics, the latter work including studies on single nucleotide
polymorphisms, which has helped to shed light on the presence of hypertension
in certain subpopulations of women.
