Professor Jon Rasbash
Obituary
Jon Rasbash, who was Professor of Computational Statistics and Director of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling at the University of Bristol, sadly passed away on 10 March, 2010, aged 49. He is survived by his wife, Jacky and children, Zoe and Molly.
Jon was an outstanding researcher with a truly international reputation and at the peak of his career, He was also a wonderful person, a wise and generous manager, and a friend to all those who had the good fortune to share in his work. The loss to social and medical science is immense. Jon was involved with many things, but principally he had become known for his development of multilevel methodology and its software implementation and for his interest in studying social relationships within families.
Jon was born the youngest of four children to David and Maureen Rasbash in November 1960. He spent his later childhood in Edinburgh where his father was appointed as Professor of Fire Engineering at the University. He then studied at the University of York and left university in 1982 with a degree in Biology and Computer Science. He then went to work for Professor Bill Hill in the Department of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh and published his first paper with Professor Hill on modelling long-term artificial selection in finite populations in 1986. His first introduction to medical research was his work with Professor Michael Healy at the London School of Hygiene in 1986-1987 with whom he published two papers in the growth studies in Annals of Human Biology. Following that he moved around the corner to the Institute of Education to work with Professor Harvey Goldstein on multilevel modelling, a methodology then in its infancy. The group, joined by Bob Prosser, Huiqi Pan, Min Yang, Ian Plewis and Geoff Woodhouse, began to develop not just the methodology and training materials but, crucially, under Jon’s supervision, the software, later to become MLwiN, that was required to fit the statistical models. Joined later by Bill Browne and Fiona Steele the Centre for Multilevel modelling was formed and eventually found its present home in Bristol. There were numerous developments during this period, in all of which Jon played a key role, and without his support, enthusiasm and insight, many things would not have happened.
The move to Bristol saw Jon take over the direction of the Centre and in the comparatively short time of 5 years, with the support of all his colleagues in the centre team, at Bristol, he succeeded in establishing it as one of the University’s elite groupings with large amounts of research income, numerous publications and considerable amounts of material to support users of multilevel models. He was very active in organising workshops for a wide range of users, all over the world. His enthusiasm and knowledge inspired many.
His most ambitious project, well under way at the time of his death, was the development of a general framework for the specification of complex statistical models that would enable users, with different levels of statistical and computing expertise, to set up complex models that would interface with a variety of software packages. This work, and much of the other activity he was involved in will be continued by the Centre team and his other collaborators, all of whom are grateful for the support and inspiration that he has given.
Jon was totally unique. Those of us who had the privilege of knowing and working with him have been vastly enriched and whatever research emerges over the coming years will have Jon’s imprint all over it. Thanks for everything Jon. We will miss you.
Harvey Goldstein, Fiona Steele and William Browne.
Bristol, March 2010
Research Interests
Jon Rasbash's research interests included: developing new statistical methodology for exploring Social Science research questions, designing and building computer software to implement statistical methodology, computational algorithms for statistical model estimation, user interface design for statistical software, approaches to training social scientists in statistical modelling, the application of multilevel modelling to child development and family research, multilevel population genetics models; multilevel cross-classified and multiple membership models, multilevel models with latent categorical effects.
Biography
Jon was the main architect and programmer for the MLwiN software package in Multilevel Analysis. The software is used by over 7,000 researchers around the world and is the analysis tool used in over 1500 ISI published papers.
Jon arrived at Bristol from the London Institute of Education in 2004 to set up the CLIO centre for Multilevel Modelling. The centre now has members, shared grants and research students with the School of Geographical Sciences and the School of Veterinary Sciences. Jon held numerous positions, including Visiting Fellow/Professor, University of Toronto; Visiting Fellow/Professor, University of Rochester; and Special Advisor, University of Aberdeen.
Computational interests
- use of MathML to represent statistical models and user interfaces
- MCMC algorithms for model estimation
- visualisation of statistical models
- the application of multilevel models to child development and family data.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: MLwiN Birthday Video
- MLwiN Birthday Video Video of Jon Rasbash speaking briefly about the history of MLwiN - a non-exact transcript was mailed out to the CMM Multilevel Modelling mailing list in our March 2009 newsletter.