Terence Paul "Terry" Speed (born 14 March 1943 in Victor Harbor, South Australia),[ FAA FRS]
Early life and education
Terry Speed was born in Victor Harbor, in South Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In 1961, he started a joint degree in medicine and science at the University of Melbourne, but later focussed on science only, obtaining a honours degree in mathematics and statistics in 1964.
Speed obtained a Ph.D. from Monash University in 1968 with a thesis titled Some topics in the theory of distributive lattices under the supervision of Peter D. Finch.
Career
After his PhD, Terry Speed took a lecturing position in Sheffield (United Kingdom), at the Manchester-Sheffield School of Probability and Statistics. In 1974, he returned to Australia, becoming assistant professor at the University of Western Australia, heading the statisticians in the department of mathematics. He then became professor in 1975 and head of department in 1982. In 1984, Terry Speed became chief of the division of mathematics and statistics at CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
After a two month visit in the department of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984, he applied for a permanent position and became a tenured professor there in 1987. In 1996, Suzanne Cory, director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), in Melbourne and former high-school classmate of Speed, invited him to start a bioinformatics group at the institute. Starting in 1997, he shared his time between the two institutions.
In 2009, he retired from the University of California, Berkeley, while keeping academic collaborations with the university, including the supervision of PhD students and postdocs. He started working full time at WEHI, where he was head of the Bioinformatics division until 31 August 2014, and has remained a laboratory head since then. He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009 and 2010.
In 2016, a former colleague and a former post-doctoral researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, filed a complaint of sexual harassment against Speed, with the allegedly infringing behavior occurring in 2002.[ 'Ally of women in science' Professor Terry Speed accused of harassment, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, published on 23 March 2018, retrieved on 23 March 2018][
]
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Statement by WEHI, on 22 January 2018, retrieved on 23 March 2018
Speed has supervised at least 72 research students.[
]
Notable work
Terry Speed has contributed to a wide range of subjects,
Expert witness
Speed was an expert witness for the defense of O.J. Simpson at the trial for the O. J. Simpson murder case,[ Defense witness list for the O.J. Simpson civil trial, published by USA Today.] as well as an expert witness in the Imanishi-Kari case, an affair of alleged scientific misconduct which involved biologist David Baltimore.[Daniel Kevles (1998), The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. 345–348.] Much earlier in his career, he was an expert defence witness in the 1966 trial of Ronald Ryan, the last person executed in Australia; however, his evidence that Ryan must have been at least 2.55 metres tall (he was only 1.73 metres) to fire the fatal shot failed to sway the jury.[ Blue Mountains Gazette, 31 October 2013. Retrieved 21 October 2017]
Awards and honours
In 1989 Speed was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[ View/Search Fellows of the ASA , accessed 2016-11-19.]
Speed was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2004.[ List of Past Executive Committee Members , on the Web site of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.] In 2002, he received the Pitman medal.[ Australia Fellowship for WEHI’s Professor Terry Speed , press release by WEHI on 29 Jan 2009.] On 30 October 2013, he received the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Science.
Personal life
Speed married Freda Elizabeth (Sally) Pollard in 1964.[
]
External links
