Tormod Næs

Tormod Næs (born February 11, 1954) is a Norwegian statistician working in chemometrics and sensometrics. He studies multivariate statistical analysis, spectroscopy, food science, and sensory science. His impact on chemometrics is exemplified by the over 8,000 citations to his most well-known book, Multivariate Calibration (with Harald Martens), and the awards in chemometrics that he has received.

Education Tormod Næs obtained both his master's degree (1978) and PhD (1984) in statistics from University of Oslo.

Career For most of his career Næs has worked at Nofima (Norwegian Food Research institute) at Ås, achieving the title of Senior Scientist. He has been a professor at the University of Oslo, the University of Copenhagen, and Stellenbosch University. chairman of the organising committee for the ‘PLS’07: 5th International Symposium on PLS and Related Methods (September 2007) and chairman of the 16th Scandinavian Symposium on Chemometrics (SSC16): Chemometrics in Action (June 2019).

During his time at Nofima, Næs has been project and task leader of a number of research projects financed by Research Council of Norway and EU (Marie Curie). Among these was "ConsumerCheck," a four-year (2009–2012) international project which involved researchers working in collaboration with Nofima from their home bases in South Africa, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Næs served as the project leader for "Panelcheck" for eight months (September 1, 2007–May 5, 2007). PanelCheck is a well established open source software package of multiple statistical and graphical tools used within the field of sensometrics for performance analysis of trained sensory panels. It was developed by researchers at MATFORSK (Norwegian Food Research Institute), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the University of Copenhagen.

Næs has been European editor of Journal of Chemometrics (2003–2005) and served as associate editor of Technometrics (2007–2008). He is currently (as of 2023) on the editorial board of Food Quality and Preference, Journal of Chemometrics and Italian Journal of Applied Statistics (Statistica Applicata).

Næs has supervised 24 PhD students to their final degree. In their award address, Isaksson spoke about the role of NIR spectroscopy in food quality, and Næs spoke about the use of principal component analysis, least squares regression, and Euclidean distance or Mahalanobis distance in chemometrics.

In 2012 Næs and coauthors O. Tomic, B. H. Mevik, and H. Martens received the Kowalski Prize from the Journal of Chemometrics for their paper "Path modelling by sequential PLS regression" (2011). (with Tomas Isaksson) 1997: EAS Award for Outstanding Achievements in Chemometrics 2004: Kowalski Prize in Chemometrics (with coauthor Ingunn Berget)(Journal of Chemometrics) 2014: Member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences 2023: T he 16th Herman Wold medal in Gold from the Chemometrics Division of the Swedish Chemical Society (Svenska Kemisamfundet)