Iain M. Johnstone

Iain Murray Johnstone (born 1956) is an Australian born statistician who is the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor in Quantitative Science in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.

Education Johnstone was born in Melbourne in 1956. In 1977 he graduated in mathematics at the Australian National University, specializing in pure mathematics and statistics. Later he obtained an M.S. and a Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University in 1981 under Lawrence D. Brown with the dissertation titled, Admissible Estimation of Poisson Means, Birth–Death Processes and Discrete Dirichlet Problems.

Research In the 1990s, he was known for applications of wavelet methods for noise reduction in signal and image processing, and turned them in statistical decision theory. In the 2000s he turned to the theory of random matrices in multidimensional problems of statistics. In Biostatistics he cooperated with medical professionals in the application of statistical methods, particularly in cardiology and in prostate cancer.

Academic career He joined the Department of Statistics, Stanford University after completion of his Ph.D. in 1981. He is the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor in Quantitative Science in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.

Awards He was a Guggenheim Fellow and Sloan Fellow. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.