A conversation with Tavia Gordon

Abstract

Tavia Gordon was born on December 14, 1917, in Chicago, Illinois. He received a B.A. degree in anthropology from the University of California in 1938. He did graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1938-1939, in mathematics at the University of Southern California in 1947-1948, and in mathematical statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948-1950. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Council on Epidemiology, American Heart Association. His tenure at NIH included the years 1954-1960 and 1966-1977, beginning as an Analytical Statistician with the Biometrics Research Section of the National Heart Institute. He spent the next two years at the Biometry Branch at the National Cancer Institute. His last 10 years at NIH were spent at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. During this period he was heavily involved in the development of the design and analysis of the first long-term, large-scale community-based follow-up study in the United States, the Framingham Study. He was awarded the NIH Director's Award in 1977. Since leaving the National Institutes of Health, he has been a consulting statistician, a senior scientist for General Electric Corporation and, since 1981, a Research Professor at George Washington University Biostatistics Center.