Terry Speed | |
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| Born | Terence Paul Speed (1943-03-14)14 March 1943 (age 82)[1] |
| Citizenship | Australia |
| Alma mater | Monash University (PhD) |
| Spouse | [1] |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Some topics in the theory of distributive lattices (1968) |
| Doctoral advisor | Peter D. Finch[2] |
| Doctoral students | |
| Website | |
Terence Paul "Terry" Speed (born 14 March 1943 inVictor Harbor,South Australia),[1]FAAFRS[3] is an Australianstatistician. A senior principal research scientist at theWalter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, he is known for his contributions to theanalysis of variance andbioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis ofmicroarray data.
Terry Speed was born inVictor Harbor, inSouth Australia, and grew up inMelbourne. In 1961, he started a joint degree in medicine and science at theUniversity of Melbourne, but later focussed on science only, obtaining a honours degree in mathematics and statistics in 1964.
Speed obtained aPh.D. fromMonash University in 1968 with a thesis titledSome topics in the theory of distributive lattices under the supervision of Peter D. Finch.[2][4]
After his PhD, Terry Speed took a lecturing position inSheffield (United Kingdom), at theManchester-Sheffield School of Probability and Statistics. In 1974, he returned to Australia, becoming assistant professor at theUniversity of Western Australia, heading the statisticians in the department of mathematics. He then became professor in 1975 and head of department in 1982. In 1984, Terry Speed became chief of the division of mathematics and statistics atCSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
After a two month visit in the department of statistics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1984, he applied for a permanent position and became a tenured professor there in 1987. In 1996,Suzanne Cory, director of theWalter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), inMelbourne and former high-school classmate of Speed, invited him to start abioinformatics group at the institute. Starting in 1997, he shared his time between the two institutions.
In 2009, he retired from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, while keeping academic collaborations with the university, including the supervision of PhD students and postdocs. He started working full time at WEHI, where he was head of the Bioinformatics division until 31 August 2014, and has remained a laboratory head since then. He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for theInfosys Prize in 2009 and 2010.
In 2016, a former colleague and a former post-doctoral researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, filed a complaint of sexual harassment against Speed, with the allegedly infringing behavior occurring in 2002.[5][6]
Speed has supervised at least 72 research students.[2]
Terry Speed has contributed to a wide range of subjects,[7][8][9] includingdistributive lattices,ring theory,analysis of variance andbioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis ofmicroarray data.
Speed was anexpert witness for the defense of O.J. Simpson at the trial for theO. J. Simpson murder case,[10] as well as an expert witness in theImanishi-Kari case, an affair of allegedscientific misconduct which involved biologistDavid Baltimore.[11] Much earlier in his career, he was an expert defence witness in the 1966 trial ofRonald Ryan, the last person executed in Australia; however, his evidence that Ryan must have been at least 2.55 metres tall (he was only 1.73 metres) to fire the fatal shot failed to sway the jury.[12]
In 1989 Speed was elected as aFellow of the American Statistical Association.[13]
Speed waspresident of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2004.[14] In 2002, he received thePitman medal.[15] In 2009 he was awarded aNHMRC Australia Fellowship.[16] On 30 October 2013, he received the AustralianPrime Minister's Prize for Science.[17][18] Speed was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society (FRS) of London in 2013. His nomination reads:
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-readDNA sequencing, but Speed continues to contribute new ideas for the new technology. At other time in his career, Speed has made seminal contributions tobioinformatics,statistical genetics, the analysis of designed experiments, graphical models andBayes networks.[3]
Speed married Freda Elizabeth (Sally) Pollard in 1964.[1]
