Professor V. Radu Craiu

Department of Statistical Sciences
University of Toronto
700 University Ave
Toronto, ON M5G 1Z5 Canada
E-mail: radu.craiu AT utoronto DOT ca

Additional Information

About me

I was born in Bucharest, Romania and spent my school years there. After studying Mathematics at the University of Bucharest (BSc '95, MSc '96), I left Romania in 1996 to study Statistics at the University of Chicago where I was lucky to work under the doctoral supervision of Xiao-Li Meng. After obtaining my PhD degree in 2001, I have joined the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and to Full Professor in 2013. I served as Chair of the Department for 5 years (2018 - 2022 and 2023-2024). I am a Contributing Editor for the IMS Bulletin and Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Statistics Surveys, The Canadian Journal of Statistics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, and Statistical Methods and Applications. I enjoy a few hobbies, including avid escaping in fictional universes (aka reading), photography, getting lost in beautiful places, and several sports practiced at comically mediocre levels, preferably accompanied by my family: Lei, Clara and Lucas.

Research and Awards

Over the years I worked in several areas of statistics. In my doctoral thesis, I looked at techniques to increase the efficiency of various Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers. This led to my long-lasting development of computational methods for Bayesian statistics. Later on, I became interested in competing risks, model selection, multiple testing, latent variable models and sample surveys. My work with copulas started in graduate school with the study of multivariate distributions with uniform marginals and special dependence structures, and subsequently led me to consider their use for flexible statistical modelling. I collaborate on projects in genetics, ecology, and more recently, astronomy. My collaborators, PhD students and other trainees have constantly inspired me and played a large part in my evolution as a researcher. I am a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Faculty Affiliate of the Vector Institute, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and have received the 2016 CRM-SSC prize given by the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques and the Statistical Society of Canada. The paper Likelihood Inflating Sampling Algorithm, co-authored with Reihaneh Entezari and Jeffrey Rosenthal, has received the 2019 CJS Award.