Statistics, astronomy and astrophysics professor retires after 39 years

Jogesh Babu, distinguished professor of statistics and of astronomy and astrophysics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science and co-founder of the field of astrostatistics, retired from Penn State on Aug. 1, after nearly four decades of service to the University.

Recalling astrostatistics’ genesis with Penn State astronomy and astrostatistics professor and field co-founder Eric D. Feigelson, Babu said, “In the 1980s, Eric approached me with a question — an astronomy question for a statistician. From that meeting, the field of astrostatistics was born.”

Babu was born in India and received his master’s degree in statistics in 1970 and his doctorate in statistics in 1974, both from the renowned Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. In 1985, he came to Penn State as a visiting professor.

Together, Babu and Feigelson have written or edited seven books on astrostatistics, and they have hosted and organized the international conference Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy a total of eight times.

“Jogesh really promoted the field of astrostatistics during a time when nobody was paying attention,” said Feigelson, distinguished senior scholar and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. “At the first Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy conference in 1991, statisticians barely talked to astronomers; but 15 years later, at the 2006 meeting, folks from different fields were avidly talking to each other and sharing ideas.”

Babu recalled how, at the time, astronomy students didn’t receive formal training in statistics as part of their graduate degree programs.

“Their departments didn’t have any required statistics courses,” he said, “so we sought to fix this deficiency.”

Added Feigelson: “We realized that the young graduate students in astronomy were the future. 

Thus, the Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers was created. First run in 2005, it has since taught statistical methodology to more than 2,000 students over the course of 18 summer schools. The summer school was the first activity of the cross-disciplinary Center for Astrostatistics that Babu continuously directed since he co-founded it with Feigelson in 2003. 

In 2018, Eric Ford, distinguished professor of astronomy and astrophysics and co-hire of the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, joined the center and added to the programming by creating the Summer School in Astroinformatics. Since then, the astroinformatics school has taught computational methods to more than 300 students.

“The center also hosts lunch meetings for statistics and astronomy students and faculty to meet each other,” Ford said. “These have been successful in facilitating collaborations between our two disciplines.”

Feigelson added about the center’s collaborative nature: “I couldn’t have done it without him, and he couldn’t have done it without me. We’re a team. We still are, even though we are both edging toward the end of our careers. I must’ve walked between my office in Davey Lab and Jogesh’s in Thomas Building hundreds of times to talk to Jogesh. This whole time, we’ve been doing something innovative and influential in improve the statistical methodology in a field of physical science. I will miss him a lot when he retires, but we’ve had a very long run.”

Beyond Penn State, Babu served as the president of the International Astrostatistics Association, which he helped found, from 2018 to 2020, and he is an elected member of the International Statistics Institute and the International Astronomical Union. Babu was also the 2018 winner of the Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.

“In the field of astrostatistics, everyone knows Jogesh, and many have benefited from his leadership at least once,” said Hyungsuk Tak, assistant professor of statistics and ICDS co-hire at Penn State.

After his retirement, Babu said, he hopes to write a book on probabilistic number theory, a subject he studied prior to coming to Penn State.

“I wish Jogesh the best in his retirement,” said Nicole Lazar, professor and head of statistics. “He has been an incredible member of our faculty and a leader in the field of astrostatistics.” 

Murali Haran, professor of statistics and former department head, also praised Babu’s long-time accomplishments.

“Jogesh has been a world leader in astrostatistics, and he and his collaborator Eric Feigelson were regarded as pioneers well before it became the popular discipline it has become over the past couple of decades,” he said “He has led astrostatistics research, workshops, and the very popular annual summer schools that have made Penn State synonymous with astrostatistics. With over four decades at Penn State and even longer as an academic, Jogesh is also a great source of history about the department and our discipline, from his personal interactions with legendary figures like P.C. Mahalanobis to his collaboration on number theory with Paul Erdös, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century.”