Robert Tibshirani has made important contributions to the statistical analysis of complex datasets. Some of his most well-known contributions are the lasso, which uses L1 penalization in regression and related problems, generalized additive models and Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM). He also co-authored four widely used books ‘Generalized Additive Models’, ‘An Introduction to the Bootstrap’, ‘The Elements of Statistical Learning’, and ‘Sparsity in Statistics: the Lasso and its generalizations’.

Professor Tibshirani co-authored the first study that linked cell phone usage with car accidents, a widely cited article that has played a role in the introduction of legislation that restricts the use of phones while driving. He is one of the most widely cited authors in the mathematical sciences field.

Robert Tibshirani trained at the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto, and Stanford University, and is a Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Data Sciences, and of Statistics, at Stanford University. He was elected to the U.S National Academy of Sciences in 2012.