After graduating from the public school system at the young age of 16, Gelfand attended the City College of New York as an undergraduate where he excelled in mathematics.
Gelfand’s matriculation to graduate school symbolized both a physical and educational transition as he moved cross-country to attend Stanford University and pursue a Ph.D. in Statistics.
[3] In 2015, his department threw a birthday conference April 19–22 in Durham, North Carolina that included eminent speakers such as Adrian F. M.
[4] After attending a short course taught by Adrian Smith at Bowling Green State University, Gelfand decided to take a sabbatical to Nottingham, UK with the intention of working on using numerical methods to solve empirical Bayes problems.
Since its publication, the general methods described in Gelfand and Smith (1990) has revolutionized data analysis allowing previously intractable problems to now be tractable.