Ralph A. Bradley was born in Smith Falls, Ontario, Canada on Nvember
28, 1923, but grew up in the village of Wellington on the shores of Lake
Ontario. He graduated from Queen’s University in 1944 with an honors
degree in mathematics and physics, was in the Canadian Army, 1944–1945
and returned to Queen's to complete an M.A. degree in 1946. In 1946 he entered
the then new doctoral program in theoretical statistics at the University of
Nrth Carolina and received the Ph.D. degree in June, 1949. His first academic
position was at McGill University, 1949–1950, followed by nine years at
the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1950–1958. Bradley moved to Florida
State University in 1959 to found a Department of Statistics there, heading the
department until 1978, with the exception of ten months in Egypt in 1966 as a
consultant to the Ford Foundation and the Institute of Statistical Studies and
Research of the University of Cairo. He moved to the University of Georgia as
Research Professor of Statistics in 1982. Although he retired in 1992, he
continues to participate in activities in statistics there. He has been named
Professor Emeritus at both Florida State and Georgia Universities.
¶ Bradley has played a leadership role in the professional societies.
He was Editor of Biometrics, 1957–1962, and VicePresident
and President of the Eastern North American Region (1963–1965). He
served as VicePresident (1975–1978) and President (1981) of the
American Statistical Association (ASA). He headed (with Margaret E. Martin) the
Coordinating Committee of the ASA Building and Development Fund
(1982–1988) and was a member of the Future Goals Committee (1980). He
has also served on various committees of the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics, been active in the International Statistical Institute, the Gordon
Research Conferences, the Southern Regional Committee on Statistics, and the
Ntional Institute of Statistical Sciences. He has served on the editorial
boards of Biometrics, the Journal of Statistical Computing and
Simulation, and Communications in StatisticsTheory and
Methods and acted as an editorial advisor on the Wiley Series on
Probability and Statistics (1954--1998).
¶ Bradley has been active in research throughout his career. He has
over 110 research papers in such areas as design of experiments, non
parametric statistics, methodology for sensory evaluations, sequential
analysis, multivariate analysis, probability theory and computing tech
niques. Most of his papers stemmed from his statistical consulting on applied
problems, or from the need to develop new theory to solve such problems.
Bradley's consulting with General Foods on statistical methods in product
evaluation was particularly influential in stimulating his own research and the
research of others.