Pranab K. Sen

Pranab Kumar Sen (7 November 1937 – 31 December 2023) was an Indian-American statistician who was a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Biography Pranab Kumar Sen was born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, India on 7 November 1937, as the second of seven siblings. His father, a railway officer, died of leukemia when Sen was ten, and he was raised by his mother, the daughter of a physician. his doctoral advisor was Hari Kinkar Nandi.

Research and graduate advising Sen was the author or co-author of multiple books on non-parametric statistics, the advisor of over 80 Ph.D. students, and the author of over 600 research publications. and for the Theil–Sen estimator, a form of robust regression that fits a line to two-dimensional sample points by choosing the slope of the fit line to be the median of the slopes of the lines through pairs of samples.

Awards and honors Sen was a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the American Statistical Association (ASA). He became the Cary C. Boshamer Professor in 1982. In 2002, he won the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award of the ASA, and he was the 2010 winner of its Wilks Memorial Award "for outstanding contributions to statistical research, especially in nonparametric statistics and biostatistics; and for exceptional service in mentoring doctoral students." In 2012, the University of Calcutta awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree.

In 2007, a festschrift was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

Books authored