Terry Speed facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Terry Speed
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Terence Paul Speed
14 March 1943 |
| Citizenship | Australia |
| Alma mater | Monash University (PhD) |
| Spouse(s) |
Freda Elizabeth (Sally) Pollard
(m. 1964) |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions |
|
| Thesis | Some topics in the theory of distributive lattices (1968) |
| Doctoral advisor | Peter D. Finch |
| Doctoral students |
|
Terence Paul "Terry" Speed was born on March 14, 1943, in Victor Harbor, South Australia. He is a famous Australian statistician. A statistician is someone who collects and analyzes numbers and data.
He is a senior research scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia. Terry Speed is well-known for his work in analysis of variance and bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is a field that uses computer science to understand biological information, like DNA. He especially helped with understanding data from microarrays, which are tools used in biology to study genes.
Contents
Early Life and School Days
Terry Speed was born in Victor Harbor, South Australia. He grew up in Melbourne. In 1961, he started studying both medicine and science at the University of Melbourne.
However, he later decided to focus only on science. He earned a special degree in mathematics and statistics in 1964. Terry Speed then got his Ph.D. (a very high university degree) from Monash University in 1968. His Ph.D. project was about "distributive lattices," which are a type of mathematical structure.
Terry Speed's Career Journey
After finishing his Ph.D., Terry Speed became a lecturer in Sheffield, United Kingdom. He worked at the Manchester-Sheffield School of Probability and Statistics. In 1974, he moved back to Australia.
He became an assistant professor at the University of Western Australia. There, he led the statisticians in the mathematics department. He became a full professor in 1975 and the head of the department in 1982. In 1984, Terry Speed became the chief of the mathematics and statistics division at CSIRO. CSIRO is a big Australian organization for scientific research.
Working in America and Australia
In 1984, Terry Speed visited the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. He liked it so much that he applied for a permanent job there. In 1987, he became a tenured professor at Berkeley. This means he had a permanent teaching position.
In 1996, Suzanne Cory, who was the director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne, invited him to start a bioinformatics group. She had been a classmate of his in high school. Starting in 1997, he split his time between the two institutions: Berkeley and WEHI.
In 2009, he retired from the University of California, Berkeley. However, he continued to work with the university on research projects. This included helping Ph.D. students and postdocs. He then started working full-time at WEHI. He was the head of the Bioinformatics division there until 2014. Since then, he has continued to lead a laboratory at WEHI.
Terry Speed has guided at least 72 students in their research studies.
Important Research Work
Terry Speed has worked on many different topics. These include distributive lattices (a math topic), ring theory (another math topic), analysis of variance (a statistics method), and bioinformatics. He is especially known for analyzing data from microarrays.
Helping in Court Cases
Terry Speed has also worked as an expert witness in court cases. This means he used his knowledge to help explain complex information to a jury. He was an expert witness in a famous court case involving O.J. Simpson. He also helped in the Imanishi-Kari case, which was about whether a scientist had done anything wrong.
Earlier in his career, in 1966, he was an expert witness in the trial of Ronald Ryan. Ronald Ryan was the last person to be executed in Australia. Terry Speed's evidence suggested that Ryan would have needed to be very tall to fire the fatal shot. However, his evidence did not convince the jury.
Awards and Special Recognitions
In 1989, Terry Speed was chosen as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. This is a special honor for statisticians. He was also the president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2004.
In 2002, he received the Pitman medal. In 2009, he was given an NHMRC Australia Fellowship. On October 30, 2013, he received the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Science. This is a very important award in Australia.
Terry Speed was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) of London in 2013. The Royal Society is one of the oldest and most respected scientific organizations in the world. His nomination for this honor said:
Speed is regarded internationally as THE expert on the analysis of microarray data. This results partly from the sheer ingenuity of his work, and in part it is due to his commitment to working closely with biomedical scientists, enabling him to appreciate first-hand the biological challenges and the consequent requirements of new methodology. Microarrays are now being replaced by short-read DNA sequencing, but Speed continues to contribute new ideas for the new technology. At other time in his career, Speed has made seminal contributions to bioinformatics, statistical genetics, the analysis of designed experiments, graphical models and Bayes networks.
This means he is seen as the top expert in analyzing microarray data. He works closely with other scientists to solve real-world biology problems. Even as new technologies like DNA sequencing appear, he keeps coming up with new ideas. He has also made big contributions to bioinformatics, statistical genetics, and other areas of statistics.
Personal Life
Terry Speed married Freda Elizabeth (Sally) Pollard in 1964.
