Paul Meier

Faculty Member: 1952-1957

Paul Meier, an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics from 1952 to 1957, was a student of Princeton University's John Tukey, who was also a close friend of our Department's Charles Winsor. As a result, Meier was recruited to the Bloomberg School of Public Health shortly after completing graduate school. It was here that he teamed with E.L. Kaplan (then of the University of California Radiation Laboratory) to write their seminal paper "Nonparametric Estimation from Incomplete Observations," which appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1958. This paper was to lay the groundwork for modern survival analysis, a cornerstone of modern biostatistical practice.

Paul Meier left the Bloomberg School in 1957. His outstanding career also included long appointments at the University of Chicago (1957-1992) and Columbia University (1992-2012), during which time he continued to make important contributions to the methods for and practice of clinical trials. Meier passed away on August 7, 2011.