Simon Sheather

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Simon J. Sheather is an Australian-American statistician and the eighth dean of the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics, a role he began on July 1, 2018. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (named in 2001) and is known for the Sheather–Jones bandwidth selection method used in kernel density estimation. Born in Australia to a bank clerk and a nurse, he earned first-class honours in mathematical statistics from the University of Melbourne and a Ph.D. in statistics from La Trobe University. He has held professorships at the University of New South Wales and Texas A&M University, and has been a visiting professor at Pennsylvania State University and at the Stern School of Business at New York University. While at Texas A&M, he started two professional master’s programs. In 2021, he became the first holder of the Truist Chair in Data Analytics.