A Conversation with Roger Koenker

Roger William Koenker was born February 21, 1947. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1969 and obtained his PhD in Economics from University of Michigan in 1974 under the direction of Saul Hymans. He was Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) from 1974 to 1976, and a member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1976 to 1983 and returned to UIUC as Professor in 1983. He is currently a William B. McKinley Professor of Economics and Professor of Statistics at UIUC. He is best known for his seminal work on quantile regression, which has emerged as a powerful regression analysis tool across many disciplines. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Fellow of Econometric Society, and recipient of the 2010 Emanuel and Carol Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation. The conversation covers part of Roger Koenker's career as an econometrician and statistician, starting from his college years.