Biographical Sketch
Biography
I was born in Panganiban, Catanduanes, Philippines in 1959. Catanduanes is a small island in the eastern part of the Philippine Archipelago. When I was young there was not much on the island, no cars, maybe just one bus in my town; we had a bicycle (later without brakes!), and we just enjoyed a simple life. There were nine children (5 girls, 4 boys) in my family, and I was the fourth child. My brothers and I learned to play chess and were the first to play it in our town. I was 7 years old when I learned to play chess. For my elementary schooling, I studied at Panganiban Elementary School. I remember liking math and science a lot in school.
I was very fortunate to pass the scholarship examinations for Philippine Science High School (PSHS) in Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. This was a special high school for those gifted in mathematics and science. The Philippine government provided us with scholarships, so we did not have to pay to attend this high school. There were 150 students in my batch, though at the end of 4 years, there were only 115 of us who graduated. PSHS was a turning point in my life. I was transported to a different world, with kids from very well-to-do families in the Philippines. You could say I was an outlier, perhaps lucky, since I came from the provinces and my family did not have the means. Nonetheless, PSHS exposed me to math and science, and I gravitated toward really liking math and also physics. Being a selected group of students, all enjoying and suffering at the same time, we bonded together and learned together.
After PSHS, I started my collegiate education at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos (UPLB), located in the foothills of Mount Makiling in Laguna, Philippines. I was supported by an INTAPS/NSDB scholarship. There were 12 of us under this scholarship. I studied statistics and earned my BS degree, magna cum laude, in 1979. I started my teaching career at UPLB in 1979. While teaching, I also earned an MS degree in Statistics from UPLB, under a SEARCA scholarship. I came to the United States as a graduate student at the Department of Statistics, Florida State University in Tallahassee, in 1982. I am very thankful to Florida State University for giving me an assistantship. As a graduate student, I was the recipient of the Ralph Bradley Dissertation Award at Florida State University. While in Tallahassee, I met Maria Marjorette Ociones (Marge), who became my wife in 1984. Marge is also from the Philippines. Professor Myles Hollander was my PhD advisor.
After obtaining my PhD degree in Statistics in 1986, I started as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University in Northwest Ohio. I became associate professor there in 1991, and full professor there in 1997. From 1995 to 1996, during a sabbatical leave, I was a visiting associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. I again visited the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as visiting professor from 1999 to 2000 in both the Department of Statistics and the Department of Biostatistics. My wife Marge was a post-doc at UM from 1995 to 2000 and is now a faculty member in the Biological Sciences Department. Marge Pena In August 2000, I joined the Department of Statistics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia as a professor.
Over the years I have served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, and the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics. From 2017 to 2023, I served as the Executive Secretary of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and from 2020 to 2023, I served as Program Director in the Statistics Program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 2024, I was appointed Chair of the Department of Statistics at USC.
I am an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and an Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. I have also been awarded the Michael Mungo Graduate Teaching Award and the Educational Foundation Award for Research in Science, Mathematics and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. I am also the recipient of the Severino and Paz Koh Lectureship Award in Science of the Philippine-American Academy of Science and Engineering.
I have been the recipient of external funding awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency. My research interests include Mathematical Statistics, Survival Analysis, Reliability, Stochastic Processes, Biostatistics, Financial Statistics, High-Dimensional Inference, and Foundational Issues in Statistics.
My hobbies are reading books, listening to music, playing chess, walking with my dogs (previously with the late Albert E! and now with Einstein and Mendel), and before the pandemic, playing squash and sometimes tennis. Marge and I also like to travel all over the world, and we like to visit New York City where our two daughters (Judith and Michelle) and son-in-law (Nick) reside. We have one grandson (Julian Miles) who is in NYC.
