Carl Neracher Morris is a professor in the Statistics Department of

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

and spent several years as a researcher for the

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financ ...

working on the

RAND Health Insurance Experiment The RAND Health Insurance Experiment (RAND HIE) was an experimental study from 1974 to 1982 of health care costs, utilization and outcomes in the United States, which assigned people randomly to different kinds of plans and followed their behavio ...

Early life

Carl Morris had received his BS in Aeronautical Engineering from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1960 and then attended

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. * Indiana Univers ...

until 1962. He obtained his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University under advisor Charles Stein in 1966. Since 1990, Morris has been at Harvard Statistics Department and

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools ...

Department of Health Care Policy. He served as the chair of the Harvard Statistics Department from 1994 to 2000. Morris has also been a professor at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge ...

, Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, Stanford University, and the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

where he served as Director of the Center for Statistical Sciences. Morris is a Fellow of the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuous ...

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts ...

, and

Royal Statistical Society The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is an established statistical society. It has three main roles: a British learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics for the public good. ...

, and an elected member of ISI. Morris was an editor of both the ''Theory and Methods'', the ''

Journal of the American Statistical Association The ''Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA)'' is the primary journal published by the American Statistical Association, the main professional body for statisticians in the United States. It is published four times a year in Ma ...

'' (1983–1985) and ''

Statistical Science ''Statistical Science'' is a review journal published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The founding editor was Morris H. DeGroot, who explained the mission of the journal in his 1986 editorial: "A central purpose of ''Statistical S ...

'' (1989–1991). Morris is best known for his work on

natural exponential families In probability and statistics, a natural exponential family (NEF) is a class of probability distributions that is a special case of an exponential family (EF). Definition Univariate case The natural exponential families (NEF) are a subset of ...

with quadratic

variance function In statistics, the variance function is a smooth function which depicts the variance of a random quantity as a function of its mean. The variance function is a measure of heteroscedasticity and plays a large role in many settings of statistica ...

s (NEF-QVF), a theory which classifies the most common statistical distributions. Morris is also well known for his work in sports statistics.

References

MathSciNet reference
*"Natural Exponential Families with Quadratic Variance Functions," Breakthroughs in Statistics, 1997, (3), 374-394. Reprinted from Annals of Statistics (1982). Living people American statisticians Year of birth missing (living people) California Institute of Technology alumni Indiana University alumni Stanford University alumni Harvard University faculty Stanford University faculty University of California, Santa Cruz faculty University of Texas at Austin faculty Fellows of the American Statistical Association RAND Corporation {{US-statistician-stub