Lancaster-Warwick-Stirling node

Murray was trained in Mathematical Statistics (BSc, PhD) at Sydney University and did postdoctoral work at the Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at Chapel Hill. After a period in the Department of Statistics at the University of New South Wales he joined the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1969, and built up a small statistical consulting group there in Psychology. He had a visiting year at the Educational Testing Service in 1971-2 as a Fulbright Senior Fellow, and left Macquarie in 1976 to take up a Social Sciences Research Council Professorial Fellowship in Statistics applied to the Social Sciences at the University of Lancaster, UK. In 1979 he was appointed Professor of Applied Statistics and foundation Director of the Centre for Applied Statistics at Lancaster, and directed a large SSRC-supported research programme (1979-85) in EM algorithm applications. The Centre developed substantial research and consulting connections with the quantitative social science departments at Lancaster, and formed the basis for what is now one of the largest groups of statisticians in the UK.

Murray left Lancaster in 1986 for a sabbatical year at Tel Aviv University, followed by an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at the Educational Testing Service. He returned to Tel Aviv as Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences. In 1992 he was awarded an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellowship, initially at the Australian National University and then at the University of Western Australia, where he worked on foundational issues in statistical inference and non-parametric maximum likelihood in mixture model applications. At the conclusion of the fellowship in 1996 he was appointed to the Chair of Statistics at the University of Newcastle, UK, from which he took early retirement in 2004. In 2000-2002 he held a consulting position in Washington DC, as Chief Statistician at the Education Statistics Services Institute, a division of the American Institutes for Research which provided consultancy to the National Center for Education Statistics of the US Department of Education. He continued to work as a consultant for NCES after 2002 in Newcastle, and this continues in Melbourne, where he has been an Honorary Professorial Fellow in Psychology (2004-2008) and in Mathematics and Statistics (2008 - ) at the University of Melbourne.

He has published three jointly authored books on statistical modelling, and is currently working on two new books. He has published 87 papers, and has supervised 12 doctoral students and five masters students.

Murray is a Member of the International Statistical Institute (1982), a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1984), and was awarded the DSc degree by Sydney University (1997) for his published research.