Introduction
Nan McKenzie Laird (born September 18, 1943) is a professor in Biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.
Research
Laird received her PhD from Harvard University in 1975 under Arthur Dempster.
Laird is well known for many seminal papers in biostatistics applications and methods, including the Expectation-maximization algorithm. She is a highly cited author according to the ISI Web of Knowledge.
Honors
Her honors include the Purdue University Myra Samuels Lecturer award (2004), the Janet L. Norwood Award (2003) and F.N. David Award (2001) from the American Statistical Association, and several other fellowships.