UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Murali Haran, professor of statistics in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State, has been named editor-in-chief of the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics (JABES) for a three-year term starting in 2026.
JABES is published jointly by the American Statistical Association, the world's largest professional organization for statisticians, and the International Biometric Society, a professional and academic society promoting statistical and mathematical theory and methods in the biosciences. JABES is dedicated to introducing new statistical methods to solve challenging problems in the agricultural, biological, and environmental sciences. The journal is international in both its authors and readership, with previous editors-in-chief representing five different continents.
Much of Haran's research is motivated by problems in environmental science and disease modeling. For instance, with collaborators in the Department of Geosciences and the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State he has studied the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the transmission of infectious diseases, respectively. In addition to interdisciplinary research, he has worked extensively on fast computer algorithms for solving statistical problems and on methods for analyzing ''spatial data'' — observations that have locations associated with them. He has published in both scientific journals and statistical methodology journals, with his research recognized with the 2015 El-Shaarawi Young Researchers Award from the International Environmetrics Society.
"I am honored to take on this role,” Haran said. “This is a time when biology, agriculture, and the environmental sciences are being transformed by powerful statistical, machine learning and AI methods, as well as interesting new kinds of data that are available to scientists. It will be exciting to learn about the new questions and statistical ideas emerging in these fields over the next three years."
Haran joined the faculty at Penn State in 2004, and served as the head of the Department of Statistics between 2018 and 2024.