Roger W. Hoerl

Dr. Roger W. Hoerl leads the Applied Statistics Laboratory at GE Global Research, which focuses on new product and service development within each of the GE businesses. Dr. Hoerl has been named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Society for Quality, and has been elected to the International Statistical Institute and the International Academy for Quality. He has received the Brumbaugh and Hunter Awards, as well as the Shewhart Medal, from the American Society for Quality, and the Founders Award from the American Statistical Association. In 2006 he received the Coolidge Fellowship from GE Global Research, honoring one scientist a year from among the four global GE Research and Development sites for lifetime technical achievement. He used his six-month Coolidge sabbatical to study the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, spending a month traveling through Africa in 2007.

Dr. Hoerl has authored five books in the areas of statistics and business improvement, two book chapters, and over 35 refereed journal articles. Hoerl's introductory text Statistical Thinking: Improving Business Performance, co-authored with Dr. Ronald Snee, was described as "...probably the most practical basic statistics textbook that has ever been written within a business context" by the journal Technometrics. More recently, Hoerl served as an editor of the fourth edition of Statistics, A Guide to the Unknown, published by Duxbury Press in 2006. He is currently working with Dr. Presha Neidermeyer of West Virginia University on a book discussing how to combat the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, which should be published in June 2009.