Lincoln E. Moses
1922-Dec. 17, 2006
Portola Valley, California

Lincoln E. Moses, who spearheaded the development of biostatistics at Stanford University, died Dec. 17 at his home in Portola Valley. He was 84.

Mr. Moses held a split appointment between Stanford's department of statistics and the School of Medicine's department of health research and policy. The two interests led him to become one of the early leaders in moving statistics from the academic to the applied and to his founding of the medical school's division of biostatistics.

Statistics departments in the 1950s and 1960s focused mainly on mathematics, said Bradley Efron, Stanford professor of statistics and of health research and policy. He said Mr. Moses opened "a window on a different world of statistics for me and for many people."

Mr. Moses held important administrative posts on campus. He was head of the department of statistics from 1964 to 1968. He also served as associate dean in humanities and sciences and as dean of graduate studies.

Mr. Moses was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Stanford with a bachelor of arts degree in 1941 and a doctorate in statistics in 1950. He served in the U.S. Navy and later spent two years on the faculty of Columbia University before returning to Stanford in 1952. Mr. Moses shared a passion for bird watching with his wife, Mary Lou, as well as some of his colleagues. They traveled across California, southern Africa, the Arctic Circle, China and Mongolia in pursuit of birds.

One of his skills was the ability to extract a cork from a bottle of wine without using a corkscrew. "Somehow he'd sort of bounce the bottom of it against the wall, gently, several times and the cork would pop out," said Mr. Efron. "It was really fun to see him do it."

Mr. Moses is survived by his second wife, Mary Lou Moses, and nine children, four from his first marriage and five from his second.

Tags: teacher/educator