James Berger

James Orvis Berger (born April 6, 1950, in Minneapolis, Minnesota) In 2024–25, Berger has been elected as a Hagler Fellow at the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University.

Contributions to science Berger has worked on the decision theoretic bases of Bayesian inference, including advances on the Stein phenomenon during and after his thesis. He has also greatly contributed to advances in the so-called objective Bayes approach where prior distributions are constructed from the structure of the sampling distributions and/or of frequentist properties. He is also recognized for his analysis of the opposition between Bayesian and frequentist visions on testing statistical hypotheses, with criticisms of the use of p-values and critical levels.

Awards and honors Berger has received numerous awards for his work: Guggenheim Fellowship, the COPSS Presidents' Award and the R. A. Fisher Lectureship. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by Purdue University.