Program Director
Probability and Statistics Programs

Robert Serfling graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Mathematics and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Ph.D. in Statistics. He then served on the faculty of the Department of Statistics at the Florida State University from 1967 until 1979, when he joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University. In 1993 he relocated to the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, his current affiliation. He has enjoyed leaves to NSF's Division of Science Resources Statistics at NSF as a Visiting Statistical Advisor, to the Limburgs Universitair Centrum, Belgium, as a Visiting Scholar under support of the Belgian NSF, and to the Institut fur Mathematische Stochastik der Albert--Ludwigs-Universitaet at Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, as a Humboldt Preistrager.

Serfling's research activity encompasses statistics, probability, and applied stochastic processes. He especially enjoys solving problems of a general nature abstracted from novel motivating applications. His primary current research areas are nonparametric and robust multivariate analysis, especially multivariate quantile methods, and outlier identification and handling in computational geometry problems. He also is working on dimension reduction. Other recent work includes robust estimation in actuarial science and shot noise on cluster point processes. Past work includes stochastic behavior of sums of dependent random variables, Poisson approximation, U-statistics, generalized L-statistics, robust and nonparametric univariate inference, large deviation theory, and asymptotic statistical theory.

E-mail: rserflin@nsf.gov
Phone: 703-292-4884
Fax: 703-292-9032