Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran FRS[1] (14 July 1917 – 19 September 1988) was an Australian statistician who made significant contributions to probability theory and its application to population and evolutionary genetics.

During the war Moran worked in rocket development in the Ministry of Supply and later at the External Ballistics Laboratory in Cambridge.

He worked on applied physics including vision, camouflage, army signals, quality control, road research, infra-red detection, metrology, UHF radio propagation, general radar, bomb-fragmentation, rockets, ASDICs and on operational research.

After the war, Moran returned to Cambridge where he was supervised by Frank Smithies and worked unsuccessfully on determining the nature of the set of points of divergence of Fourier integrals of functions in the class Lp, when 1 < p < 2.

Patrick Moran was appointed university lecturer in mathematics in 1951, at Oxford, without stipend, for as long as he held the post of senior research officer in the Institute of Statistics.

[3] On 1 January 1951, Moran was appointed foundation professor of statistics in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra .

It houses offices of the Mathematical Sciences Institute, tutorial rooms and the Research School of Economics.