George T. Duncan

He has served as Director of the Heinz School’s MS, MPM and Ph.D. Programs. He served as Associate Dean for Faculty from 2001 to 2002. Prior to coming to Carnegie Mellon University, he taught in the mathematics department at the University of California at Davis. He is a Visiting Faculty Member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has been a visitor at Cambridge University and was the Lord Simon Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester in 2005. Duncan holds a B.S. and M.S. in Statistics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Minnesota.

Duncan is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. In 1996, he was elected Pittsburgh Statistician of the Year.

Duncan's general research interests are in Bayesian decision making and information technology and social accountability. His primary focus is on confidentiality of statistical databases. His work has appeared in leading journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Management Science, Econometrica, Operations Research, Psychometrika, and Biometrika. He has given keynote presentations in New Zealand, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and England.
Teaching

His recent teaching includes statistical theory, advanced empirical methods, Bayesian inference, probabilistic methods in information technology, and management science.

As a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines from 1965 to 1967, Duncan taught at Mindanao State University. He served as editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (ASA); Secretary of the Statistical Educational Section of ASA; Chair of the ASA Committee on Statistics in Selected Professions; Chair of the Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality of ASA.

Between 1989 and 1993, he chaired the National Academy of Sciences' Panel on Confidentiality and Data Access, which resulted in the book, Private Lives and Public Policies: Confidentiality and Accessibility of Government Statistics. He has served on privacy and confidentiality committees of the American Medical Association, the National Research Council's Institute of Medicine, and The University of Michigan. He has served on National Academy of Sciences Panels on Research Access to Data, Use of Census Data in Transportation Studies, and Whither Biometrics?