P. A. P. Moran

Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran FRS

He married in 1946 after his appointment; he and his wife Jean Mavis Frame had three children, Louise, Michael and Hugh. At Oxford Moran wrote several papers on the nonlinear breeding cycle of the Canadian lynx. He was made a lecturer at Oxford in 1951 but left the university later that year for Australia. He never acquired a PhD, "a fact he would recall with some pride in later life", recalls Hall.

On 1 January 1951, Moran was appointed foundation professor of statistics in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. He worked on the stochastic study of dam theory, and on population genetics, publishing his first paper "Random processes in genetics" in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1958 and culminating in his 1962 book The Statistical Processes of Evolutionary Theory. He also worked on geometric probability.

In 1963, he was awarded the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal by the Australian Academy of Science.

He retired from ANU at the end of 1982; he stayed on as Emeritus Professor and worked on statistical methods in particular epidemiological methods and their application to psychiatry. He was awarded an honorary ScD degree from Cambridge, on 29 October 1963, and a DSc from Sydney. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975.

Moran died after a stroke in 1988. The P.A.P Moran Building (Building 26B) at A.N.U. was named in his honour. It houses offices of the Mathematical Sciences Institute, tutorial rooms and the Research School of Economics. The Moran Medal, created in his honour, is awarded by the Australian Academy of Science every two years for distinguished work in statistics by an Australian statistician.