Walter W Piegorsch PhD, PStat

Dr. Piegorsch is a Professor of Mathematics, a Professor of Public Health, a Professor of Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering, Director of Statistical Research & Education at the University's BIO5 Institute, a Member and former Chair of the University’s Graduate Interdisciplinary Program (GIDP) in Statistics, and he holds accreditation as a Professional Statistician (PStat) from the American Statistical Association.  Dr. Piegorsch studies data science for environmental problems, with emphasis on environmental informatics and risk assessment.  He coordinates these interests with his research translating quantitative risk analytics to problems in public health, including geo-spatially referenced disaster informatics; statistical data analytics; and multiple/simultaneous inferences for toxicological and genetic endpoints. He currently leads a team developing statistical benchmark dose markers in environmental hazard analyses. This research has been funded by the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute. He also has constructed statistical models for data from transgenic bio-technologies, developed guidelines for the design of bioassays in select transgenic animal systems, and has proposed retrospective designs for analyzing gene-environment and gene-nutrient interactions in human population studies.  Dr. Piegorsch has held a number of professional positions, including Chairman of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics & the Environment (2004); Vice-Chair of the American Statistical Association Council of Sections Governing Board (1997-1999), and election to the Council of the International Biometric Society (2002-2005). Beginning in 2010 he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Environmetrics, the oldest scientific journal publishing on the development and application of quantitative methods in the environmental sciences.  He also has served as Joint-Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory & Methods Section), the flagship journal of the association; as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, a major reference source by John Wiley & Sons publishing its second edition in 2012; and as a member of many journal editorial boards, including Environmental and Ecological Statistics, Environmetrics, Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis, Mutation Research, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Biometrics. Dr. Piegorsch has been honored as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1995), a Member (by Election, 1995) of the International Statistical Institute, and has received the Distinguished Achievement Medal of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics and the Environment (1993), and the University of South Carolina Educational Foundation Research Award for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering (2000). He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics at the Biometrics Unit, Cornell University, in 1984, after which he spent nine years as a practicing statistician with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and then 13 years as a faculty member with the Department of Statistics at the University of South Carolina.