Brief Biography

Christopher K. Wikle is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Statistics at the University of Missouri (MU), with additional appointments in Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences and the Truman School of Public Affairs.  He received a PhD co-major in Statistics and Atmospheric Science in 1996 from Iowa State University.  He was research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research from 1996-1998, after which he joined the MU Department of Statistics. 

His research interests are in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics applied to environmental, ecological, geophysical, agricultural and federal survey applications, with particular interest in dynamics.  His work has been concerned with formulating computationally efficient deep hierarchical Bayesian models motivated by scientific principles, with more recent work at the interface of deep neural models in machine learning.   

Awards include elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), elected Fellow of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University, ASA Environmental (ENVR) Section Distinguished Achievement Award, co-awardee 2017 ASA Statistical Partnership Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award, the MU Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences, the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award, and Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award.  His book Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data (co-authored with Noel Cressie) was the 2011 PROSE Award winner for excellence in the Mathematics Category by the Association of American Publishers and the 2013 DeGroot Prize winner from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.  His latest book, Spatio-Temporal Statistics with R, with Andrew Zammit-Mangion and Noel Cressie, was published in 2019 and won the 2019 Taylor and Francis award for Outstanding Reference/Monograph in the Science and Medicine category. Dr. Wikle is Associate Editor for several journals and is one of six inaugural members of the Statistics Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.