Lurdes Inoue

Lurdes Yoshiko Tani Inoue is a Brazilian-born statistician of Japanese descent, who specializes in Bayesian inference. She works as a professor of biostatistics in the University of Washington School of Public Health.^[1]

Inoue's grandparents emigrated from Japan to Brazil in the 1930s; she was born in São Paulo, where she grew up.^[1]

She earned bachelor's and master's degree from the University of São Paulo in 1992 and 1995,^[2] and received a fellowship from the Brazilian government to continue her studies in the US.^[1] She completed her Ph.D. in statistics in 1999 from Duke University,^[2] under the supervision of Don Berry.^[3]

After postdoctoral research at the University of Texas, she joined the University of Washington in 2002.^[1] In 2019, she became the chair of the biostatistics department.^[4]

With Giovanni Parmigiani, she is the author of the book Decision Theory: Principles and Approaches (Wiley, 2009).^[5] This book won the DeGroot Prize of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for 2009.^[6]

In 2014, Inoue was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association "for substantial and fundamental contributions to Bayesian decision theory and innovation in the statistical modeling of disease progression with applications to cancer research; for outstanding mentoring of junior researchers; and for exemplary service to the profession."^[7]