John Lafferty appointed the Malone Professor of Statistics and Data Science

John D. Lafferty, newly named as the John C. Malone Professor of Statistics and Data Science, conducts research on statistical machine learning, with a focus on computational and statistical aspects of nonparametric methods, high-dimensional data, graphical models, and statistical language modeling.

Lafferty earned his doctoral degree in mathematics from Princeton University, where he was a member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He worked as a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, before joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. He was previously the Louis Block Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago before joining Yale in July 2017 as professor of statistics and data science, with a secondary appointment in computer science.

Lafferty is a widely published contributor to peer-reviewed academic journals. He currently serves as associate editor of Bernoulli and of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. He has been awarded research grants from private foundations as well as federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Yale professor’s honors include four “Test of Time” awards from the International Conference on Machine Learning. In 2015, he was invited to deliver a Medallion Lecture by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.