Robert D. Gibbons is the Blum-Riese Professor of Biostatistics and a Pritzker Scholar at the University of Chicago. He has appointments in the Departments of Medicine, Public Health Sciences, Psychiatry, and Comparative Human Development. He also directs the Center for Health Statistics. Professor Gibbons is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the International Statistical Institute, and the Royal Statistical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed scientific papers and six books. His statistical work spans the areas of longitudinal data analysis, item response theory, environmental statistics and drug safety and has led to thousands of applications in the biological and social sciences. Professor Gibbons has received life-time achievement awards from the American Statistical Association, the American Public Health Association and Harvard University.