Principles and Methods for Data Science, Volume 43

Arni S.R. Srinivasa Rao is a mathematical modeler and probability researcher who is a Professor at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University. He is the Director of Laboratory for Theory and Mathematical Modeling housed within the Division of Infectious Diseases, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, U.S.A. Previously, Dr. Rao conducted research and/or taught at Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford (2003, 2005-07), Indian Statistical Institute (1998-2002, 2006-2012), Indian Institute of Science (2002-04), University of Guelph (2004-06). Until 2012, Dr. Rao held a permanent faculty position at the Indian Statistical Institute. He has won the Heiwa-Nakajima Award (Japan) and Fast Track Young Scientists Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences (DST, New Delhi). Dr. Rao also proved a major theorem in stationary population models Rao's Partition Theorem in Populations, Rao-Carey Theorem in stationary populations, and developed mathematical modeling based policies for the spread of diseases like HIV, H5N1, COVID-19, etc. He developed a new set of network models for understanding avian pathogen biology on grid graphs (these were called chicken walk models) and received wide coverage in the science media. Currently, he is researching deep learning and artificial intelligence techniques to be used in medicine.

Professor C. R. Rao, born in India, is one of this century's foremost statisticians, and received his education in statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta. He is Emeritus Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics at Penn State and Director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis. He has long been recognized as one of the world's top statisticians, and has been awarded 34 honorary doctorates from universities in 19 countries spanning 6 continents. His research has influenced not only statistics, but also the physical, social and natural sciences and engineering.

In 2011 he was recipient of the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Gold which is awarded triennially to those "who are judged to have merited a signal mark of distinction by reason of their innovative contributions to the theory or application of statistics". It can be awarded both to fellows (members) of the Society and to non-fellows. Since its inception 120 years ago the Gold Medal has been awarded to 34 distinguished statisticians. The first medal was awarded to Charles Booth in 1892. Only two statisticians, H. Cramer (Norwegian) and J. Neyman (Polish), outside Great Britain were awarded the Gold medal and C. R. Rao is the first non-European and non-American to receive the award.

Other awards he has received are the Gold Medal of Calcutta University, Wilks Medal of the American Statistical Association, Wilks Army Medal, Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society (UK), Megnadh Saha Medal and Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal of the Indian National Science Academy, J.C.Bose Gold Medal of Bose Institute and Mahalanobis Centenary Gold Medal of the Indian Science Congress, the Bhatnagar award of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India and the Government of India honored him with the second highest civilian award, Padma Vibhushan, for “outstanding contributions to Science and Engineering / Statistics”, and also instituted a cash award in honor of C R Rao, “to be given once in two years to a young statistician for work done during the preceding 3 years in any field of statistics”.

For his outstanding achievements Rao has been honored with the establishment of an institute named after him, C.R.Rao Advanced Institute for Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, in the campus of the University of Hyderabad, India.