Ron Gallant is Hanes Corporation Foundation Professor of Business
Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, with secondary
appointment in the Department of Economics, Duke University. He is also
Adjunct Professor, Department of Statistics, University of North Carolina.
Before joining the Duke faculty, he was Henry A. Latane Distinguished
Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. He retains emeritus status at UNC. Previously he was,
successively, Assistant, Associate, Full, and Drexel Professor of
Statistics and Economics at North Carolina State University. Gallant
has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Duke
University, and Northwestern University. He received his A.B. in
mathematics from San Diego State University, his M.B.A. in marketing
from the University of California at Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. in
statistics from Iowa State University. He is a Fellow of both the
Econometrics Society and the American Statistical Association. He
has served on the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic
Research, the Board of Directors of the American
Statistical Association, and on the Board of Trustees of the National
Institute of Statistical Sciences. He is co-editor of the Journal
of Econometrics and past editor of The Journal of Business and
Economic Statistics.
Gallant is interested in fitting models from the sciences to data for the purpose of statistical inference. Typically these models will involve a nonlinear parametric component that describes features of the model where the underlying scientific theory is explicit and a nonparametric component that accounts for features where the scientific theory is vague. Appropriate statistical methods for these problems are usually computationally intensive. Methodological interests are in developing statistical methods and numerical algorithms for fitting these models. Theoretical interests are in deriving the statistical properties of proposed methods, particularly the asymptotic properties of estimators of functionals of the nonparametric component. Applied interests are primarily within economics and finance.
Gallant lives in Chapel Hill with his wife, Marcia Gallant, who is an elementary school librarian. He has two children, Megan and Drew, who live in San Francisco and are software engineers.