Terry Speed


Terence Paul "Terry" Speed, FAA FRS is an Australian statistician. A senior principal research scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, he is known for his contributions to the analysis of variance and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.

Early life and education

Speed obtained a Ph.D. from Monash University in 1968 with a thesis titled Some topics in the theory of distributive lattices under the supervision of Peter D. Finch.

Career

Speed is currently laboratory head in the Bioinformatics division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, in Melbourne, and was head of the division until 31 August 2014. Previously, he was sharing his time between this position and the department of statistics of the University of California, Berkeley.
Speed was an expert witness at the trial for the O. J. Simpson murder case, as well as an expert witness in the Imanishi-Kari case, an affair of alleged scientific misconduct which involved biologist David Baltimore. Much earlier in his career, he was an expert defence witness in the 1966 trial of Ronald Ryan, the last person executed in Australia; however, his evidence that Ryan must have been at least 2.55 metres tall to fire the fatal shot failed to sway the jury.
Speed has supervised at least 69 research students.

Awards and honours

In 1989 Speed was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Speed was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2004. In 2002, he received the Pitman medal. In 2009 he was awarded a NHMRC Australia Fellowship. On 30 October 2013, he received the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Science. Speed was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013. His nomination reads:

Personal life

Speed married Freda Elizabeth Pollard in 1964.

Scandal

In 2016 a former colleague and a former post-doctoral researcher from the University of California, Berkeley filed a complaint of sexual harassment against Speed with the infringing behavior occurring in 2002. In 2018, after a conclusive finding was obtained but with the final part of the investigation stalled, one of the complainants, Lior Pachter, decided to go public with the conclusions of the investigation. As part of a settlement reached between Speed and the University of California, Berkeley, Speed resigned from the university.