Longtime ASA member and Fellow Stephen Portnoy passed away December 28, 2025. A professor emeritus in the department of statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Portnoy was a preeminent statistician who published more than 100 research articles and served as the editor of the Theory and Methods section of the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Born in Kankakee, Illinois, Portnoy completed his undergraduate degree in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his PhD in statistics from Stanford University. He served as an assistant professor in the department of statistics at Harvard University before returning to Illinois to join the department of mathematics at the University of Illinois. In 1985, he established the department of statistics there.
In 2016, Portnoy was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributions to asymptotic theory and quantile processes, leadership in the development of robust regression methods, and building significant collaborations between statistical science and ecology.
Portnoy leaves a legacy in the field of statistics.
To learn more about Portnoy, read a tribute from the University of Illinois.
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