michaelpearce (at) reed (dot) edu
Assistant Professor of Statistics
Reed College
Portland, Oregon
About Me
Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Reed College in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. I completed my Ph.D. in statistics in 2023 at the University of Washington, advised by Professor Elena A. Erosheva.
I am a Bayesian statistician with work in ordinal data methods, model-based clustering, and statistical demography. Recently, I have focused on the statistical analysis of preference data, such as ratings and rankings. The goal of these methods is to infer a population's preferences, opinions, or attitudes, often with the goal of improving collective decision-making. This work has applications in voting theory, peer review, and survey data analysis.
I earned a B.A. in mathematics with a concentration in statistics from St. Olaf College. Outside of academia, I have worked as a data analytics consultant at Deloitte LLP and an applied statistics intern at Boeing. I am originally from Long Lake, Minnesota. In my free time, I enjoy biking, trail running, climbing, watching movies, and singing with the Portland Gay Men's Chorus.
Recent News
- August 2024: I will be presenting a talk, "Broadening Access to Bayesian Statistics with Active Learning" on the topic-contributed panel Teachers as Facilitators: How Can Statistics Educators Support Active Learning? during the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) here in Portland.
- July 2024: I will be presenting at ISBA 2024 in Venice, Italy on my recent arXiv preprint, "Bayesian Rank-Clustering" (joint work with Elena A. Erosheva).
- May 2024: I won the 2024 Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Classification Society! I will present my dissertation work at 2024 Classification Society Annual Meeting in June 2024 at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan.
- July 2023: "A new approach to grant review assessments: score, then rank" has been published (open access) in Research Integrity and Peer Review.
- June 2023: My dissertation, "Methods for the Statistical Analysis of Preferences, with Applications to Social Science Data," is now publicly available here.