Biography
Roy E. Welsch is the Eastman Kodak Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management and a Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Center for Statistics and Data Science. He is the Director of the MIT Center for Computational Research in Economics and Management Science.
Welsch joined the MIT faculty in 1969 as an assistant professor, became an associate professor four years later, and was promoted to professor in 1979. He held the Leaders for Manufacturing (now Leaders for Global Operations) chair from 1988 until 1993. From 1973 until 1979, he was also a Senior Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he participated in the development of the Troll econometric, financial, and statistical modeling system. He was co-director or director of the MIT Statistics Center from 1981 until 1989.
Welsch is widely recognized for his book, Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity, (with Edwin Kuh and David Belsley) on regression diagnostics and for his work on robust estimation, multiple comparison procedures, nonlinear modeling, and statistical computing. He is currently involved with research on robust process control and experimental design, credit-scoring models and risk assessment, diagnostics for checking model and design assumptions, volatility modeling in financial markets, uncertainty quantification in plots and images, and repurposing existing drugs or combinations of drugs to prevent or delay Alzheimer's disease by creating synthetic clinical trials based on electronic health records. Welsch teaches Data Analysis and Applied Statistics, focusing on regression modeling, experimental design, and quality control with financial and marketing applications. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Welsch holds an AB in mathematics from Princeton University as well as an MS and a PhD in mathematics from Stanford University.