A memorial service is scheduled for Saturday for a University of California, Berkeley biostatistician and a statistician of public health who was a pioneer and world leader in his field, yet never forgot the modest roots from which his career was born.
Dr. Chin Long Chiang, who had been battling pancreatic cancer, died in April at his Berkeley home about seven months shy of his 100th birthday. A professor emeritus in biostatistics, Chiang taught for 40 years at the university where he’d earned two graduate degrees.
Chiang’s use of statistics helped transform the health care field, impacted analyses of public health issues and underscored why biostatistics deserved to become its own discipline.
Dr. Steve Selvin, a UC Berkeley biostatistics professor, praised Chiang’s work as “highly respected and innovative, opening new vistas from health data.”
Born in China, Chiang earned his bachelor’s degree in economics, although his passion lay in statistics. At a time when countless young men had already joined the Chinese army, he and his wife came to the United States in 1946 with other students on a warship that had been reconfigured into a passenger vessel.
Although they gained admission to East Coast universities, they fell in love with northern California and chose to settle there. At the time, UC Berkeley lacked a statistics department and only had a statistics laboratory within the math department.
Chiang earned his master’s degree in 1948 and Ph.D. in 1953, both in statistics, and he worked as a research assistant at UC Berkeley’s statistics lab. But, along the way, he and his wife, who was also a graduate student, ran out of money. In a stroke of luck, Chiang won an $800 fellowship that allowed him to finish his studies rather than return to China. Years later, as a sign of gratitude, he established a scholarship fund to aid needy graduate students in the university’s public health school.
