Nicholas Horton
Professor of Statistics
Burton Hall 313
(413) 585–3688
nhorton AT smith.edu
Office hours (Spring 2012): by appointment
Research Interests and Activities
I am interested in developing methodology for the analysis of missing and/or incomplete data as well as the analysis of longitudinal or repeated measures data. I also work on the development of methods for analyzing multiple informant and multiple outcome data in services research, alcohol and drug abuse studies, and psychiatric epidemiology. My books on SAS and R, R, and SAS are available for purchase. Finally, I am involved in several research projects studying how to improve statistical education.
I'm active with the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association, the ASA Council of Chapters and the ASA Section on Statistical Education.
In the recent past, I helped to coordinate workshops on statistical consulting at liberal arts colleges and integrating the statistics and natural science curricula. I organize the applied statistics lecture series at Smith. Here are notes from my 2007 JSM talk on incorporating the ARTIST online assessments into intro statistics classes and a pointer to a webinar on Being Warren Buffett. I created the Statistics Haiku Project and the Linear Algebra Haiku Project. I'm really excited about Weave and related tools as a means to foster reproducible statistical analyses.
Background
I earned my A.B. from Harvard College and my Sc.D. in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to coming to Smith in 2003, I taught in the Department of Biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health. I had the great pleasure of spending a sabbatical year at the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland (the birthplace of R, among many other things). I was the recipient of the American Statistical Association Waller Education award in 2009 and the Smith College Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching in 2010.
