I earned a PhD in Statistics from Princeton. I then joined the Department of Social Statistics at Cornell in 1975, where I’ve taught since then. (For a coincidental link, the Department’s home is the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, which turned out to be the undergraduate school of Nick Mullins, who was my social science side advisor at Dartmouth—but I didn’t know that until I came here.)
[more]My whole career for the past 40 plus years has been built directly upon work that I started in my BA thesis in MSS at Dartmouth. I wrote about the application of computing and mathematical models to support decision making in rural New England towns. That was 1970. In 1977, I graduated from MIT’s Sloan school working in system dynamics and computer modeling (I had first encountered this field in a senior seminar at Dartmouth). I have been teaching simulation modeling to masters and PhD students in public administration and information science at the University at Albany ever since 1977.
[more]My career has been as a city and regional planner, always specialized in the spatial distribution of activities and travel, which are amenable to quantitative analysis. With the expansion of computing hardware and software, such work has expanded to increasingly sophisticated simulations and visualizations. I worked for many years on Boston's Big Dig providing input to the traffic simulation model which guided its planning, design and construction. I am proud that the Greenway now adds value to live in Beantown. Quantitative thinking can have real impacts on public policies and projects.
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