Christopher Paciorek

Christopher Paciorek is an adjunct professor and research computing consultant in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has expertise is in the areas of Bayesian statistics and spatial statistics with primary application to environmental and public health research. Dr. Paciorek's work in recent years has focused on methodology and applied work in a variety of areas, in particular, quantifying trends in extreme weather, quantifying millennial-scale changes in vegetation using paleoecological data (as part of the PalEON project, on which he was one of the principal investigators), and developing computational software for hierarchical modeling (the NIMBLE project: r-nimble.org, on which he is co-principal investigator). He has also worked on measurement error issues in air pollution epidemiology, Bayesian methods for global health monitoring with a focus on combining disparate sources of information, and spatio-temporal modeling of air pollution.

Dr. Paciorek received the Health Effects Institute Walter A. Rosenblith New Investigator Award in 2006 and the Leonard J. Savage Award for best Ph.D. dissertation in the area of Bayesian Theory and Methods in 2004.  Before coming to Berkeley, he was an assistant professor in the Biostatistics Department at Harvard School of Public Health. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, an MS in ecology from Duke University, and a BA in biology from Carleton College.