Contact Information:
Jerry Lawless
Research interests
My research interests cut across several areas of statistics, including survival and event history analysis, modeling, theory and methods for estimation and prediction, and the analysis of incomplete data. I am motivated by scientific and technical issues that arise in medicine, public health, system reliability, the social sciences and other areas.
Many of the specific problems that I consider are related to studies in which longitudinal processes involving events and other outcomes associated with individuals or inanimate units are of interest. For example, humans experience events related to health, education, employment, child-bearing and other processes; hardware or software systems may experience events that disrupt or limit service. Modelling such processes can be challenging. In addition, studies of such processes are generally subject to time and cost constraints which limit the data that can be collected and this creates a need for efficient design and analysis techniques. Papers listed in my curriculum vitae indicate many of the areas that have motivated my research, along with the types of statistical issues that I study.
Education/biography
Jerry Lawless is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. He received his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 1969 and was a faculty member there from 1972-2007, serving as department chair from 1979-84, and in 1987-88 and 2004-05. His research interests include biostatistics, survival and event history analysis, reliability, and regression methodology. He is the author of numerous papers and the books Statistical Models and Methods for Lifetime Data (John Wiley and Sons, 1982; second ed. 2003), The Statistical Analysis of Recurrent Events (with R.J. Cook, Springer, 2007) and Multistate Models for the Analysis of Life History Data (with RJ Cook, CRC Press, 2018). He has been a consultant to industry and government, is a past editor of Technometrics and a past president of the Statistical Society of Canada. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1983) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1990), and a recipient of the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada (1999). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2000.
Publications, graduate students, other information
See my curriculum vitae (PDF).