An interview with Don Hedeker

Don Hedeker was born in the late 1950s in Chicago, Illinois. He attended public schools in Chicago and did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, earning a degree in Economics in 1980. In 1981, he began graduate work in the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Committee on Research Methodology and Quantitative Psychology at the University of Chicago. He completed his dissertation in 1989 under the direction of Darrell Bock. In 1993, Don accepted a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where he was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 1996 and to Full Professor in 2001. He spent 20 years on the faculty at UIC, leaving in 2014 in order to return to the University of Chicago as a Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences. Don’s main expertise is in the development and dissemination of advanced statistical methods for clustered and longitudinal data. In addition to many methodological papers in these areas, Don has developed several freeware computer programs for statistical analysis of such data. To date, he has published over 180 papers and 1 book. Don is also an accomplished musician, and has played in bands since high school. This interview was conducted in honor of Don being awarded the 2015 Long-term Excellence Award from the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association. The interview took place in Don’s office at the University of Chicago on December 23, 2015.