About Mark Glickman

Dr. Mark Glickman, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, is Senior Lecturer on Statistics at the Harvard University Department of Statistics, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a Veterans Administration Center of Innovation. Prior to his joining Harvard, he was Research Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health. His research interests are primarily in the areas of statistical models for rating competitors in games and sports, and in statistical methods applied to problems in health services research. He served as an elected member of the American Statistical Association's Board of Directors as representative of the Council of Sections Governing Board from 2019 to 2021.

Dr. Glickman's long-standing interest in methods for rating competitors in games and sports arose from his involvement in playing tournament chess, where he attained the title of U.S. national master in 1988. Dr. Glickman is known for having invented the Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems, both of which have been adopted by many gaming organizations internationally. These models stemmed from his Harvard docotoral dissertation on foundational probability models for rating competitors with time-varying abilities, a topic on which he has since published a number of scholarly papers, including methods for pairing competitors in tournaments.

Dr. Glickman has served as a member of the US Chess Ratings Committee since 1985, and was the Chair of the Committee from 1992 through 2019, and was reappointed chair in 2022. He has also served as Chair and Program Chair for the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Sports, and has earned its Significant Contributor Honoree award in 2009. He has co-founded and co-organizes the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports, a bi-annual conference on the research and practice of applying statistical methods in sports. He is Associate Editor for the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, having served as Editor-in-Chief 2015-2017. At Harvard, he is the founding head of the Lab for Sports Analytics. He is the column editor of "Recreations in Randomness" for the Harvard Data Science Review.

Much of Dr. Glickman's publications have been in the realm of health services research. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Glickman's work critiquing the resource-based relative value scale algorithm for the Medicare Fee Schedule had led to his consultation to government agencies in Ontario and Alberta to help develop a statistical approach for medical fee schedule construction. He has received NIH and VA grants to study the genetic predisposition to disease onset for various cardiovascular diseases. More recently, he has developed statistical models for the detection of differential item functioning in health surveys, and helped to develop Bayesian meta-analysis models for indirect comparison of medical treatments. Among his activities outside his research, Dr. Glickman has served on NIH study sections for grant reviews, and was the editor of the "Here's to your Health" column in Chance magazine, a publication of the American Statistical Association.

Dr. Glickman received his B.A. in Statistics at Princeton University in 1986 (Summa Cum Laude, phi beta kappa), and earned his M.A. (1989) and Ph.D. (1993) in Statistics at Harvard University. He is an amateur magician who incorporates magic tricks into his statistics classes, and a pianist and guitarist who has performed in rock bands over the years. He currently resides in Cambridge, MA.