David Hunter, professor of statistics to retire after 26 years at Penn State

David Hunter, professor and former department head of statistics in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State University, to retire at the end of June, 2025. Hunter, who served as the first director of Penn State’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hub from March 2023 to June 2024, was head of the Department of Statistics from 2012 to 2018.

“Dave has had a profound impact on our department for more than a quarter century,” said Nicole Lazar, professor and department head of statistics. “He has a deep and sustained commitment to mentoring early-career faculty and fostering an inclusive and supportive environment within the department. His sage advice and support have certainly helped me in my time as department head. He will be missed.”

Hunter's research is focused on computational statistics, which is the interface between statistics and computer science. He also works with statistical models for networks, which are graphical structures representing objects and their relationships, and mixture models, which are probabilistic models used to represent how sub-populations relate to an overall population. 

Hunter was an associate director of the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) and Social Sciences Research Institute (SSRI). He was also a Penn State Teaching and Learning with Technology Faculty Fellow from 2018 to 2019, where he helped develop a grassroots community for the data sciences at Penn State.

“I will always be grateful to the people who were here in the statistics department when I arrived at Penn State in 1999: They were highly supportive of junior faculty members and worked hard to build a positive departmental climate,” Hunter said. “Now that I’m among the most senior members of my department, I’m proud that we’ve managed to maintain this culture for the past quarter century. I’m confident that the amazing teachers, researchers, and staff here will ensure that Penn State’s Department of Statistics will continue to be a great place to work while maintaining its standard of outstanding scholarship.”

Hunter was named as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2015 and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2022. He was also elected as a member of the International Statistical Institute in 2019. His awards and honors include the Rosenberger Outstanding Mentoring Award from the Department of Statistics in 2025, the Eberly College of Science Distinguished Service Award in 2024, the Outstanding Contribution Award from the CSAB Computing Society of ABET in 2023, and the Eberly College of Science Faculty Climate and Diversity Award in 2022. He was co-recipient of the Richards Software Award from the International Network for Social Networks Analysis in 2019 for creating the “statnet” package for the statistical software platform known as R.

Before joining the faculty at Penn State in 1999, Hunter was an instructor at the University of Michigan. He earned a doctoral degree in statistics at the University of Michigan in 1999. He earned a bachelor's degree, cum laude, at Princeton University in 1992, after which, he taught high school mathematics in New Hampshire from 1992 to 1994.