Obituary: David Duncan, Biostatistician at Bloomberg
School, Dies at 89
David Duncan, a distinguished professor of
biostatistics
at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health from 1960 to 1984,
died June 12, four days before he would have turned 90.
During his career, Duncan made many seminal contributions
to science and statistics.
Duncan's early work focused on regression analysis, a
topic to which he made two important contributions. First,
he was an early advocate of what has become known as the
Kalman filter, a method for dynamic estimation of the
regression equation, which has special application in time
series problems. Second, he and co-author Strother
Walker discovered logistic regression analysis as early
as 1967. Duncan was among the first to advocate the use of
logistic regression for binary responses rather than linear
regression.
Duncan's career-long love, however, was methodology
for dealing with the "multiple comparisons" issue —
how to adjust statistical error rates to account for making
a large number of inferences from one data set. In 1955, he
created the Duncan Multiple Range test, which became the
standard tool in the field for two decades. His original
paper on the topic is still one of the most cited articles
in the medical literature. Later in his career, Duncan
adopted a Bayesian approach perspective, creating the
k-ratio methodology that is also widely used today.
Duncan received his undergraduate training in
Australia at the University of Sydney. Following service in
the Australian Air Force during World War II, he attended
Iowa State University, where he earned his PhD in
statistics in 1947. After several years at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and the University of North Carolina,
he joined the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins
in 1960.
An avid tennis player, Duncan and his wife, Mary Ann,
retired in 1984 to Carmel, Calif., where Duncan continued
his work on multiple comparison problems. He regularly
communicated with and visited his Johns Hopkins colleagues,
who remember him as a gentleman and wonderful colleague who
served the Hopkins community with distinction for nearly 25
years.
In addition to his wife, Duncan is survived by his
children, Robert and George Duncan and Margaret Lane, and
seven grandchildren.
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