Walter Piegorsch
Professor, Mathematics
Bioscience Research Labs, room 230
Education:
- Ph.D., Statistics, Cornell University, 1984
- M.S., Statistics, Cornell University, 1982
- B.A., Mathematics, Colgate University, 1979
Walter W. Piegorsch, Ph.D., PStat(ASA), is the Director of Statistical Research & Education at the University of Arizona’s BIO5 Institute. He is also a Professor of Mathematics, a Professor of Public Health, and a Member and former Chair of the University’s Graduate Interdisciplinary Program (GIDP) in Statistics. Prof. Piegorsch studies data science for environmental and public health applications, with emphasis on environmental risk assessment. He coordinates this interest with his research translating quantitative risk analytics to problems in public health, including geo-spatially referenced disaster informatics; multiple/simultaneous inferences for toxicological and genetic endpoints; and the historical development of statistical thought as prompted by problems in the biological and environmental sciences. He currently leads a team developing statistical methods for estimating 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 bioassays, 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. Prof. Piegorsch 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 Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, NC, and then 13 years as a faculty member with the Department of Statistics at the University of South Carolina-Columbia, before arriving at the University of Arizona.
Environmental research interests - Environmetrics, Environmental Statistics, Quantitative Risk Assessment, Statistical Data Analytics