Mark van der Laan

Mark Johannes van der Laan is the Jiann-Ping Hsu/Karl E. Peace Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has made contributions to survival analysis, semiparametric statistics, multiple testing, and causal inference. He also developed the targeted maximum likelihood estimation methodology. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Causal Inference.

Education and career
He received his M.Sc. in mathematics in 1990 and his Ph.D. in statistics in 1993, both from Utrecht University. Between 1988 and 1989, Laan was studied as an exchange student at North Carolina State University. Laan's Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Richard D. Gill with a dissertation titled "Efficient and Inefficient Estimation in Semiparametric Models". During his Ph.D., Laan conducted research at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was advised by Peter J. Bickel. Laan became an assistant professor in biostatistics at University of California, Berkeley in 1994, and was promoted to associated professor in 1998, and professor in 2000. He became the Jiann-Ping Hsu/Karl E. Peace Endowed Chair in Biostatistics. Since 2016, Laan became the academic director of the Center of Targeted Learning in Precision Health at University of California, Berkeley.

Honors and awards
He received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2005, the Mortimer Spiegelman Award in 2004, and the van Dantzig Award in 2005.