Dr. Ben Shaby, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley
Monday, March 12, 2012, 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: Engineering 2, Room 180
Hosted By Assistant Professor Qi Gong

Abstract

There is strong evidence that extremely high temperatures are detrimental to the yield and quality of many economically and socially critical crops. Fortunately, the most deleterious conditions for agriculture occur rarely. We wish to assess the risk of the catastrophic scenario in which large areas of croplands simultaneously experience extreme heat stress. Applying a hierarchical Bayesian spatial extreme value model that allows the distribution of extreme temperatures to change in time both marginally and in spatial coherence, we ask whether the risk of widespread crop failure due to high temperatures has increased in Europe over the last century.

Biography

Ben Shaby is a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working under the direction of Dr. Cari Kaufman.  Prior to arriving at UCB, he worked at SAMSI in the spatial program and Duke University as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in statistics.  He completed his Ph.D. in statistics at Cornell University, where he was advised by Martin Wells and David Ruppert.  His primary research interests are spatial statistics, extreme value theory, and Bayesian computing.