George C. Tiao was born in London in 1933. After graduating with a B.A. in Economics from National Taiwan University in 1955 he went to the US to obtain an M.B.A from New York University in 1958 and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1962. From 1962 to 1982 he was Assistant, Associate, Professor and Bascom Professor of Statistics and Business at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in the period 1973–1975 was Chairman of the Department of Statistics. He moved to the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in 1982 and is the W. Allen Wallis Professor of Econometrics and Statistics (emeritus).
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George Tiao has played a leading role in the development of Bayesian Statistics, Time Series Analysis and Environmental Statistics. He is co-author, with G.E.P. Box, of Bayesian Inference in Statistical Analysis and is the developer of a model-based approach to seasonal adjustment (with S. C. Hillmer), of outlier analysis in time series (with I. Chang), and of new ways of vector ARMA model building (with R. S. Tsay). He is the author/co-author/co-editor of 7 books and over 120 articles in refereed econometric, environmental and statistical journals and has been thesis advisor of over 25 students. He is a leading figure in the development of Statistics in Taiwan and China and is the Founding President of the International Chinese Statistical Association 1987–1988 and the Founding Chair Editor of the journal Statistica Sinica 1988–1993. He played a leading role (over the 20 year period 1979–1999) in the organization of the annual NBER/NSF Time Series Workshop and he was a founding member of the annual conference “Making Statistics More Effective in Schools of Business” 1986–2006. Among other honors he was elected ASA Fellow (1973), IMS Fellow (1974), member of Academia Sinica, Taiwan (1976) and ISI (1980), and was recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal, DGBAS, Taiwan 1993, the Julius Shiskin Award, 2001, the Wilks Memorial Medal Award, 2001, and the Statistician of the Year Award in 2005 (ASA Chicago Chapter). He received honorary doctorates in 2003 from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and National Tsinghua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.