Ryan J. Tibshirani

Ryan Joseph Tibshirani (born December 15, 1985) is a professor and chair of the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His work spans high-dimensional statistics, nonparametric estimation, distribution-free inference, convex optimization, and epidemic tracking and forecasting.

Early life and education Tibshirani was born on December 15, 1985 in Toronto, Canada. He earned a B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford in 2011; his dissertation, The Solution Path of the Generalized Lasso, was advised by Jonathan Taylor.

Career From 2011 to 2022, Tibshirani was a faculty member in the Department of Statistics and Department of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He joined UC Berkeley in 2022 and became department chair effective July 1, 2025.

In 2023, he became Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, taking over from founding Editor Michael I. Jordan. In 2024, he became founding co-Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Statistics with Rina Foygel Barber.

Research Tibshirani’s research focuses on methodology and theory for high-dimensional and nonparametric problems, often connecting statistical inference with convex optimization. He has also contributed to selective inference, to distribution-free predictive inference (conformal prediction), and to epidemic modeling and forecasting.

Awards and honors COPSS Presidents' Award (2023) Fellow, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2022). AAPOR Policy Impact Award (2022) and Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award (2022), as part of the COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey Team (Delphi/UMD/Meta) team. ASA Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award (2021), with the Delphi COVIDcast Team. Carnegie Mellon University Teaching Innovation Award (2017). NSF CAREER Award (2016).

Personal life Ryan Tibshirani is the son of statistician Robert Tibshirani, with older brother Charlie Tibshirani, and younger sister Julie Tibshirani who is a co-creator generalized random forests. He is married to Jessica Tibshirani (née Issler) and they have two children.

Selected publications