Open Research and Contributor Identifier

ORCID - 0000-0002-4062-8543

Department

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

Education

• University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. in Statistics (Erich L. Lehmann Ph.D. advisor), 1984

• Stanford University, MS in Statistics, 1978

• University of Texas at El Paso, MS in Mathematics, 1976

• University of Texas at El Paso, BS in Mathematics, 1974

Background

Javier Rojo received a BS in mathematics from UT El Paso, an MS in statistics from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in statistics from Berkeley under the direction of Erich L. Lehmann. He joined the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department in the School of Public Health at Indiana University in September of 2021 as a Dean's Eminent Scholar. Prior to joining IU, he was the Korvis Professor of Statistics at Oregon State University. Prior to that, he was the Seneca C. and Mary B. Weeks endowed Chair of Statistics and Chair of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Nevada at Reno where, as chair, he led the successful efforts to create two new Ph.D. programs. From 2001-2013 he was Professor of Statistics at Rice University where he created the AMS award winning REU RUSIS. From 1984 - 1990 he was assistant professor, associate professor (1990 - 1995), and professor (1995 - 2000) of statistics at UTEP where he founded the BioStatistical Laboratory. He has served on several National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine committees. He is an adjunct professor at the MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Civil Engineering Department at Rice. He has held positions at Sandia Labs Albuquerque, The Rand Corporation Santa Monica, Pacific Gas and Electric San Francisco, and El Paso Natural Gas Co.

Dr. Rojo is an elected Fellow of the following societies: American Statistical Association (ASA), Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), Royal Statistical Society (RSS), American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS) and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). He received the ASA 2010 Don Owen award.

Dr. Rojo's unique and effective efforts in diversifying the Mathematical Sciences through the organization of the Lehmann Symposia and Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes, and most prominently through the REU RUSIS have been recognized by various organizations. The AMS recognized RUSIS in 2014 as a "Program that makes a difference", and in 2018 he received the Etta Z. Falconer award "In recognition of your outstanding contributions to diversifying the landscape of the mathematical and statistical sciences through excellence, mentorship and leadership". In 2020, he was honored with the SACNAS Distinguished Scientist Award for "significant contributions to his field and his long-standing commitment to diversity and inclusion in STEM." Of the forty-two RUSIS alumni who have obtained Ph.D. degrees, 21 are from URM groups and 18 are female. Out of the 257 RUSIS participants, 59% have been URM students.

He was program director in statistics and probability at NSF and has participated as a member, and as chair of two subcommittees, in the 2013 NSF-DMS Committee of Visitors (COV). He again served in the NSF-DMS COV in 2016. Dr. Rojo currently serves in SAMSI's Scientific Advisory Committee and ICERM's Education Advisory Board. Previously, he was a member of MSRI's Human Resources Advisory Committee and MBI's Scientific Advisory Committee.

Dr. Rojo's research interests include survival analysis, partial orders of distribution functions and related inference problems, extreme value theory and tail-heaviness of distributions, nonparametric function estimation, statistical decision theory, random matrices, and dimension reduction techniques. Dr. Rojo serves on the following Editorial Boards: Nonparametric Statistics—having served as Editor from 2007–2011, Involve, and Statistical Theory and Practice. He edited Erich L. Lehmann's Selected Works, published by Springer, and three volumes (44, 49, 57) of the IMS Lecture Notes and Monographs Series, and a double issue of Statistical Modelling. The last four publications arose as a byproduct of the Lehmann Symposia in Optimality organized by him.

Professional Positions

• September 1, 2021–present, Dean's Eminent Scholar, Professor (with tenure), Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Indiana University-Bloomington
• January 1, 2017–August 31st 2021, Korvis Professor of Statistics, Department of Statistics, Oregon State University
• January 1, 2014–December 31st, 2016, Seneca C. and Mary B. Weeks Endowed Chair of Statistics and Chair of the Mathematics and Statistics Department, University of Nevada at Reno
• January 1, 2001–December 31st, 2013, Professor (with tenure) of Statistics, Department of Statistics, Rice University
• January 1, 1984–December 31st, 2000, Assistant/Associate (with tenure) - Professor of Statistics, Mathematical Sciences Department, University of Texas at El Paso
• September 1998–May 1999 Visiting Professor of Statistics, Southern Methodist University
• October 1992–July 1997, Founding Director, The BioStatistical Laboratory, University of Texas at El Paso

Selected Honors

• Talk "On the Existence of Rao-Blackwell Theorems", at the NSF Principal Investigators Meeting, March 1987
• Javier Rojo (1995). Presented to the MRCE External Scientific Advisory Committee, September 1995, "Statistical Modeling of Corrosion Processes", UTEP.
• Javier Rojo (2002).- (Invited speaker: Opening remarks - The work of Erich Lehmann) First Erich Lehmann Symposium, CIMAT, Guanajuato, México, May 2002.
• Javier Rojo (2003).- (Invited talk in Presidential session). IMS-WNAR meeting in Golden CO.
• Javier Rojo (2005).- (Invited talk) Nonparametric Bivariate Survival Estimation, American Statistical Association Workshop NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS: FRONTIER, Texas A&M, January 14-15.
• Javier Rojo (2007).- "Erich L. Lehmann - brief accounts", Keynote address, The 3rd Lehmann Symposium, Rice University, May 2007.
• Plenary speaker - Sesión de Estadística del XLII Congreso Nacional de la Sociedad Matemática Mexicana, Zacatecas, México, October 13th, 2009.
• Plenary speaker, XXIV Foro Nacional de Estadística, México City, October 15th, 2009.
• Javier Rojo (2010).- (Invited talk) "Dimension reduction in microarray data", PanAmerican Advanced Studies Institute on Mathematical Models and Population Dynamics at The National University of El Salvador in San Salvador, February 2010.
• Javier Rojo (2010).- (Invited talk) "Spirit of Berlin - A robotic car", Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute on Mathematical Models and Population Dynamics at The National University of El Salvador in San Salvador, February 2010.
• Key-Note Speaker (2010).- ENAR 2010 workshop "Fostering Diversity in Biostatistics".
• Don Owen Award recipient lecture (2010) "RUSIS, PASI, The Lehmann Symposia, Mentors, Students, and How to become a Statistician by Accident … Literally", Baylor University, May 9th.
• Opening remarks - Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute, CIMAT, Guanajuato, México, May 2010.
• Javier Rojo (2014). Keynote address. Body Mass Index, Obesity, Haseman-Elston, Orders by Dispersion and Estimation Under Constraints", ASA Nevada Chapter, UNLV, Oct 2014.
• Javier Rojo (2015). (Invited talk videotaped - in celebration of the center's 35th anniversary) Body Mass Index, Obesity, Haseman-Elston, Orders by Dispersion and Estimation Under Constraints. Centro de Investigación en Matematicas, Guanajuato - México, May.
• Javier Rojo (2017). Presidential Invited Address, WNAR meeting, Santa Fe, NM, June 26th.
• Javier Rojo (2018). Plenary Speaker during the International Conference on Advances in Interdisciplinary Statistics and Combinatorics. University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Oct. 6-8.
• Javier Rojo (2018). Keynote Speaker for the Statistics Workshop being organized by SAMSI during the 2018 SACNAS meeting, San Antonio, TX, October 11-13.
• Javier Rojo (2019). Plenary Speaker, "On Some Examples of Statistical Applications", Math Alliance Workshop, Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, June 5th–June 8th.

Press Releases and Special Announcements

• Javier Rojo receives the Dr. Etta Z. Falconer Award from the NSF Research Institutes in collaboration with the Infinite Possibilities Conference 2018 at Howard University.
• Javier Rojo is featured in the story about one of two StatFests he organized and financed as Chair of the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Nevada, Reno.
• Javier Rojo is featured in a story upon his arrival to the University of Nevada, Reno to serve as Chair of the Mathematics and Statistics Department and as the Seneca C. and Mary B. Weeks Endowed Chair of Statistics.
• Javier Rojo receives the 2010 ASA Don Owen award. See the story in AMSTAT news.
• Article on the Etta Z. Falconer award.
• RUSIS @ Rice University - Javier Rojo Director
• Javier Rojo elected as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
• Javier Rojo receives the SACNAS 2020 Distinguished Scientist Award. Read about the award here and here.
• College of Science article on Dr. Rojo's arrival to OSU.

Selected Publications

Articles

Javier Rojo, Daniel Vallejo Rodriguez, and Arturo Bronson (1991). "The Effect of the Scratch Shape on the Ohmic Potential Created during Scribing of Electrodes", Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Vol. 138, No 5, 1364-1368.

Javier Rojo (1992). "A Pure-Tail Ordering Based on the Ratio of The Quantile Functions", The Annals of Statistics, Vol. 20, No 1, 570-579.

Erich L. Lehmann and Javier Rojo (1992). "Invariant Directional Orderings", The Annals of Statistics, Vol. 20, No 4, 2100-2110.

Javier Rojo and Francisco Samaniego (1993). "On Estimating a Survival Curve Subject to a Uniform Stochastic Ordering Constraint", Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 88, No 422, 566-572.

Javier Rojo and Arturo Bronson (1993). "Numerical Analysis of Certain Solutions of Laplace's Equation to Calculate the Ohmic Potential Drop after Scribing", Electrochimica Acta, Vol. 38, No. 17, 2525-2532.

Javier Rojo (1995). "On the Weak Convergence of Certain Estimators of Stochastically Ordered Survival Functions", Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, Vol. 4, 349-363.

Javier Rojo (1996). "On the Classification of Probability Distributions by Tail Behavior", Journal of The American Statistical Association, Vol 91, No. 433, 378-384.

Javier Rojo (1996).- "Relationships Between Pure Tail Orderings of Lifetime Distributions and Some Concepts of Residual Life", Annals of Institute of Statist. Math., Vol 48, No. 2, 247-255.

Javier Rojo (1998).- "On the Estimation of the Quantile Function of an IFRA Distribution", Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, Vol 25, 293-310.

Javier Rojo, Enrique Villa, and Miguel Flores (2001).- "Nonparametric Estimation of the Dependence Function in Extreme Bivariate Distributions", Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 76, 159-191.

Javier Rojo and Hammou El Barmi. (2003).- "Estimation of Distribution Functions Under Second Order Stochastic Dominance", Statistica Sinica, Vol 13, No 3, 903-926.

Javier Rojo and Musie Ghebremichael (2006).- "Estimation of two ordered bivariate mean residual lifetime functions", Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Vol 97, 431-454.

Javier Rojo et al (2007).- "Assessment of the NIOSH Head-and-Face Anthropometric Survey of U.S. respirator Users", National Research Council, Institute of Medicine, The National Academies Press.

Natasha S. Becker MD, Neal R. Barshes MD, Thomas A. Aloia MD, Tuan Nguyen, Javier Rojo, Joel A Rodriguez MD, Christine A. O'Mahony MD, Saul J. Karpen MD, PhD, and John A. Goss MD (2008).- "Analysis of recent pediatric orthotopic liver transplantation outcomes indicates that allograft is no longer a predictor of survivals", Liver Transplantation, Volume 14 Issue 8, Pages 1125 - 1132.

Javier Rojo Jiménez (with Becnel Boyd L, Maynard MJ, Morgan-Linnell SK, Horton LB, Sucgang R, Hamill Versalovic J, Steffen D, Zechiedrich L) (2008). "Relationships among ciprofloxacin, gatifloxacin, levofloxacin, and norfloxacin MICs in fluoroquinolone-resistant Escherichia coli clinical isolates", Antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, Vol 53, No. 1, 229-234.

Tuan Nguyen and Javier Rojo (2009).- "Dimension reduction of microarray data in the presence of a censored survival response: a simulation study". Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology, Vol 8: Iss. 1, Article 4.

Tuan Nguyen and Javier Rojo (2009). "Dimension Reduction of Microarray Gene Expression Data: The Accelerated Failure Time Model", Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Vol 7 No 6, 939-954, December 2009. DOI No: 10.1142/S0219720009004412.

Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio and Javier Rojo, (2010). "Reliability assessment of radial lifeline systems." Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, Vol 26, No. 2, 111 - 128, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8667.2010.00661.x.

Javier Rojo (2011). "Erich Leo Lehmann - A Glimpse into his Life and Work". The Annals of Statistics, Volume 39, Number 5 (2011), 2244-2265.

Javier Rojo (2013). "Heavy-tailed densities", WIREs Comput Stat 2013, 5:30-40. doi: 10.1002/wics.1236.

Sergio Juárez and Javier Rojo (2020). "Testing for Trends in Excesses Over aThreshold using the Generalized ParetoDistribution". REVSTAT - Statistical Journal, Vol 18, No. 2, 189-202.

Books

2012 Javier Rojo - Editor. Selected Works of E. L. Lehmann. Springer-Verlag, January.

2009 Javier Rojo - Editor. The Third Erich L. Lehmann Symposium - Optimality, IMS Lecture Notes and Monograph Series, Vol 57.

2006 Javier Rojo, Editor. "The Second Erich Lehmann Symposium - Optimality", The Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Lecture Notes-Monograph Series, Vol 49.

2004 Javier Rojo, Co-Editor (with Victor Pérez Abreu)- "The First Erich L. Lehmann Symposium -- Optimality", The Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Lecture Notes-Monograph Series, Vol 44, February.