O'Brien, Timothy

Professor; Graduate Program Director (Statistics)

Dr. O’Brien obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics from North Carolina State University, and he now serves as Professor and Graduate Program Director of the Applied Statistics program at Loyola University Chicago as well as campus-wide and external statistical consultant. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (France) and at the Universität Augsburg (Germany) as a part of the National Science Foundation’s Postdoctoral Research program. In addition to conducting research in efficient experimental design strategies, he also teaches short courses worldwide on statistical consulting, design, and modeling, and frequently teaches statistical concepts to non-technical audiences. At Loyola, Dr. O’Brien helped establish the undergraduate Bioinformatics program, and was co-PI on an NSF grant to fund undergraduate research in bioinformatics and computational genomics. He has won numerous teaching awards, and has held Visiting Professorship positions internationally. Dr. O’Brien is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Benin, West Africa, where he taught Mathematics (in French), and has twice received William J. Fulbright scholarships at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. Additionally, he has studied, taught or conducted research in approximately thirty countries outside the U.S., and regularly provides technical assistance to researchers at U.S. and international universities and organizations including Partners in Health, Statisticians without Borders, and the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda.

Research Interests

Experiment design, generalized linear and nonlinear modeling, computer-intensive methods in statistics