Aad van der Vaart

Short cv

Aad van der Vaart studied mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Leiden, and received a PhD in mathematics from this university in 1987. He held positions in College Station, Texas and Paris (not in Texas), held a Miller fellowship in Berkeley, was visiting professor in Berkeley, Harvard and Seattle, and will be the GC Steward Fellow at Gonville and Caius College in 2025/26. Following a long connection to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a shorter one to Leiden University, he is now professor of statistics at TU Delft. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academiae Europaea. He received the C.J. Kok prize in 1988, the van Dantzig award in 2000, the NWO Spinoza Prize in 2015, and the DeGroot prize in 2019. He is fellow of the IM, fellow of ISBA, elected member of the ISI, and member of the circle of the IMU.

His research has been funded by NWO, VU-USF, STW, CMSB, NDNS+, STAR, and by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant, 2012).

His research is in statistics and probability, as mathematical disciplines and in their applications to other sciences, with an emphasis on statistical models with large parameter spaces. He wrote books and lecture notes (on topics such as empirical processes, time series, stochastic integration, option pricing, statistical genetics, statistical learning, Bayesian nonparametrics, causality), as well as research papers. See research page for more information.

A list of past PhD students, as well as his own advisors, can be found here.

Aad van der Vaart was associate editor of the Annals of Statistics, Statistica Neerlandica, Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincare, Probability Theory and Related Fields, Statistics and Decisions (co-editor), Indagationes Mathematicae, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference and ALEA. He was program chair for the European Meeting of Statisticians 2006 in Oslo and BNP10 (2015) in Raleigh, and local chair of BNP9 and the European Meeting of Statisticians 2015. He was member of the programme committee of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro (2018) and the European Congress of Mathematics in Portoroz, Slovenia (2020, held virtually in 2021), and section chair for Statistics and Data Science for the International Congress of Mathematicians (2022, held virtually following the Russian invasion of Ukraine).

Keynote lectures include the Forum Lectures at the EMS 2009, the Le Cam lecture at the JSM 2009, invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, a foundational lecture at the world meeting of International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2012, the Hotelling lectures in 2017, the Barrett lectures in 2017, the European Mathematical Society & Bernoulli Society lecture in 2019, and the Mordell lecture in 2023. Short courses and lecture series on semiparametric statistics, empirical processes and Bayesian inference, were delivered in, among others, Indonesia, France, the USA, Germany, China, Korea, Italy, Uruquay, Denmark, Mexico, Cyprus, Vietnam and the Netherlands.

Among former administrative functions are president of the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research (2003-07), head of the Department of Mathematics of VU University Amsterdam (2002-06), Scientific Director of the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University (2015-19), chair of the European Council of the Bernoulli Society, scientific chair of the Stieltjes Institute, chair of the mathematics board of the Lorentz Centre, board member of the NDNS+ and STAR clusters, and council member of the International Statistical Institute, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Bernoulli Society. He was a founding member of the masters programs in Stochastics and Financial Mathematics in Amsterdam and Statistics and Data Science in Leiden. In 2024 he is president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.