Instructors

Dr. Richard Vogel received his B.S. in engineering science and systems and his M.S. in environmental science from the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in water resource systems engineering from Cornell University in 1984. He has been a professor at Tufts University since 1984. His primary expertise is in the application of statistical methods to environmental and water resources problems. He was awarded the 1995 Walter L. Huber Prize in Civil Engineering from ASCE for his research on statistical applications to water resource problems. His current research program focuses on the areas of flood and drought management, watershed modeling and management, regional hydrology, water quality modeling and environmental statistics. He has taught courses and workshops in environmental statistics for over a decade. He has published over 50 refereed journal articles.

Dr. Richard Gilbert obtained his B.S. in Science Teaching at Ferris State University in 1963, his M.S. in Statistics at Kansas State University in 1965 and his Ph.D. in Biomathematics at the University of Washington in 1969. Since joining Battelle Memorial Institute in 1969, his professional experience has included the development of environmental sampling plans and data analyses, applied research, project management, and teaching short courses on the Data Quality Objectives (DQO) process and environmental statistics. He authored the widely used reference book Statistical Methods for Environmental Pollution Monitoring (1987), as well as 26 peer-reviewed papers and 60 reports, all applied to statistical aspects of environmental pollution problems. From 1971 to 1986 Dr. Gilbert developed statistical designs and conducted statistical analyses for nuclear weapons testing sites on the Nevada Test Site for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). From 1975 to 1984, he wrote and published for the DOE 27 issues of the periodical TRAN-STAT (Statistics for Environmental Studies). From 1988 to 1993, Dr. Gilbert was Statistics Task leader of the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project. From 1989 to 1992 he managed and was co-principal investigator for a U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) project to provide statistical designs and tests for evaluating the attainment of reference-based cleanup standards. Since 1992, Dr. Gilbert has facilitated and taught the DQO planning process and related environmental statistical methods at numerous DOE sites as well as for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Army. In 1999 Dr. Gilbert co-authored a handbook for the U.S. Navy that described statistical methods for assessing compliance with background concentrations at Navy facilities in California. Since 1997, Dr. Gilbert has contributed to the development of the Visual Sample Plan (VSP) software code (which can be downloaded free from http://dqo.pnl.gov/vsp that determines the number and location of samples needed to meet user-specified DQOs for environmental studies. Dr. Gilbert is currently working with Battelle statistics staff to enhance VSP to determine detector swath spacing needed to find target areas of unexploded ordnance at DoD sites. Dr. Gilbert is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), a past chair of the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment, and a consultant to the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board. Dr. Gilbert retired from Battelle on July 31, 2001 after 32 years of service. He now works hourly for Battelle.    

Dr. Cyrus Mehta studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay before obtaining his Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 1973. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at Harvard University, where he is currently Adjunct Professor of Biostatistics. He gives numerous short-courses and workshops at pharmaceutical companies, universities, and government agencies, both in the USA and overseas. For the past 15 years Dr. Mehta has concentrated his research activities on developing permutational algorithms which can be applied to nonparametric tests, to the analysis of contingency tables, and more generally to inference concerning the parameters of regression models for categorical data. These algorithms have made it computationally feasible to obtain accurate p-values and confidence intervals for small or unbalanced data sets and for sparse contingency tables. Dr. Mehta is co-founder and President of Cytel Software Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Mehta has published over 70 papers in journals like JASA, Biometrika and Biometrics. In February 2000 Dr. Mehta was honored with the Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award by the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association.

Dr. David F. Parkhurst is a professor in the Environmental Science Research Center of Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He earned his B.S. in applied mathematics at the University of Colorado in 1965, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in plant ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the latter in 1970. He also studied botany at the University of Melbourne on a Fulbright fellowship in 1966, and was research scientist at the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Physics, Aspendale, Australia (1970-1973). His research interests include the physiological ecology of plants, risk assessment for human exposures to microbes and toxic chemicals, and statistical methods for interpreting ecological and environmental data. His ecological work includes development of a mathematical model for diffusion of carbon dioxide and other gases in the interior of leaves. In risk analysis, he has investigated the use of decision trees for choosing among cleanup options at hazardous waste sites. In statistics, Prof. Parkhurst has published work on the advantages of arithmetic over geometric means for mass balance calculations, on determining mean concentrations of rare microbes (e.g., Cryptosporidium) in water supplies, and on how common uses of statistical hypothesis testing are often biased against environmental and public health protection. Dr. Parkhurst teaches graduate courses in applied mathematics, statistics, and scientific computing. In addition to his Indiana University appointment, he has held summer and sabbatical-leave appointments in the Advanced Study Program, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (1976), Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL (1980), Office of Research and Development, US EPA, Washington, DC (1982), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN (1984-1985), Australian National University, Canberra (1985), and Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY (1990-1991), and New York City Department of Environmental Protection (1993-1995).