and a Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University in 1981 under Lawrence D. Brown with the dissertation titled, Admissible Estimation of Poisson Means, Birth–Death Processes and Discrete Dirichlet Problems.

[4] In the 1990s, he was known for applications of wavelet methods for noise reduction in signal and image processing, and turned them in statistical decision theory.

In Biostatistics he cooperated with medical professionals in the application of statistical methods, particularly in cardiology and in prostate cancer.

He is the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor in Quantitative Science in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.

He received the Guy Medal in Bronze 1995 and again in Silver 2010 from the Royal Statistical Society and the 1995 COPSS Presidents' Award.