Myles Hollander was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 21, 1941. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1961 with a B.S. in mathematics. In the fall of 1961, he entered the Department of Statistics, Stanford University, earning his M.S. in statistics in 1962 and his Ph.D. in statistics in 1965. He joined the Department of Statistics, Florida State University in 1965 and retired on May 31, 2007, after 42 years of service. He was department chair for nine years 1978–1981, 1999–2005. He was named Professor Emeritus at Florida State upon retirement in 2007.
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Hollander served as Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Theory and Methods, 1994–1996, and was an Associate Editor for that journal from 1985 until he became Theory and Methods Editor-Elect in 1993. He also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Nonparametric Statistics (1993–1997; 2003–2005) and Lifetime Data Analysis (1994–2007).
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Hollander has published over 100 papers on nonparametric statistics, survival analysis, reliability theory, biostatistics, probability theory, decision theory, Bayesian statistics and multivariate analysis. He is grateful for the generous research support he has received throughout his career, most notably from the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Institutes of Health.
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Myles Hollander has received numerous recognitions for his contributions to the profession. He was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1972) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1973), and became an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (1977). At Florida State University he was named Distinguished Researcher Professor (1996), he received the Professorial Excellence Award (1997), and in 1998 he was named the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, an award made to only one faculty member per year and the University’s highest faculty honor.
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Myles Hollander was the Ralph A. Bradley Lecturer at the University of Georgia in 1999, and in 2003 he received the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award in Nonparametric Statistics from the American Statistical Association. He was the Buckingham Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in September, 1985, and had sabbatical visits at Stanford University (1972–1973; 1981–1982), the University of Washington (1989–1990) and the University of California at Davis (Spring, 2006). The following conversation took place in Myles Hollander’s office at the Department of Statistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, on April 19, 2007.