Statistics For PolymathsHad you wandered into Eric Bradlow W’88’s seventh-story Huntsman Hall office on a sunny afternoon in early March, you might have mistaken the popular K.P. Chao Professor of Marketing, Statistics, and Education for some sort of psychic. A row of framed photos was lined up before his seat, with only their velvet backings visible to a visitor. “We’re trying to assess whether people go through a slow death or more of a sudden death,” Bradlow said. “And whether people come back from the dead.”
If you’d stuck around a little longer, you would have discovered that the “people” he was talking about were Hulu.com users, and “death” was their departure from the streaming-video website. It’s the latest corner of the world that Bradlow is attempting to understand using statistical methods, and he says it’s also one of the trickiest. As co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, he’s been working with “the Hulus, ESPN.coms and Facebooks of the world” to make mathematical prediction models of what their users will do in the future: who will friend whom, who will Tweet whom, who will “die” on Hulu, and who will come back from the dead to use it again. “In essence, we have corporate partners who want academic brainpower thinking about the kinds of data and problems they’re facing today,” he says.
In 1984, Bradlow was just another Wharton freshman strolling down Locust Walk when a flyer caught his eye. In big, bold letters, it promised “Statistics and Baseball” in a lecture by University of Chicago professor Edward I. George (who has since joined Wharton as the Universal Furniture Professor of Statistics). A fan of mathematics and baseball who knew almost nothing about statistics, Bradlow figured he’d stop by to see how the two could be linked.
As George discussed shrinkage estimation—a technique that can come in handy for adjusting, say, a batting average based on a small number of at-bats—Bradlow found himself thinking, Man, this is what he gets paid to do for a living? That sounds like a lot of fun to me. In other words, he was hooked.
He transferred from his freshman-level statistics class into an honors course, and from there, moved on to graduate-level classes. Master’s and doctoral degrees in statistics from Harvard University came next, and by January of 1995—less than a year after receiving his PhD—Bradlow had already returned to Penn as a lecturer. He became a full professor the following year, but even now, 14 years later, still feels grateful for the way things shook out. “My dad went here, my uncle went here, all my cousins went here,” he says. “Penn is my home, and I’m lucky to be here.”
Over the years, he’s created statistical models to forecast the answers to all sorts of questions: Where is a song likely to appear on the Billboard Top 40, and how long it will stay there? How will a shopper’s path through the supermarket influence his purchases? And, most recently, how often will a user log on to interactive media sites like Hulu.com?
He has worked with Penn faculty members from a range of departments: education, psychology, medicine. “The good news about statistics is it never goes out of style,” he says. “People need statisticians all the time, and it’s not discipline-oriented. I like being able to take my skill set and apply it to different problems. The methods are common, but the problems are different. It’s almost like you’re starting over again each time, and that’s something that drew me to this field.”
Bradlow has proven himself inside the classroom as well, winning more than 20 Wharton teaching awards, all of which are lined up neatly on the windowsill behind his desk: an undergraduate excellence in teaching award; several “Goes Above and Beyond the Call of Duty” awards; the Miller-Sherrerd MBA Core Teaching Award. “I try to see things as simply as possible, so that’s the way I try to teach: What is the fundamental concept [a student] needs to learn to understand this topic?” he says. Pedagogy isn’t something he takes lightly. For his first few years as a professor, Bradlow videotaped his lectures, then sat down with a teaching expert to review the footage. “I was naturally a fairly good teacher,” he adds, “but it’s also something I’ve worked at quite a bit.”
While Bradlow says he’s “tremendously honored” to have been selected as one of the first Penn Fellows, “I keep telling them I’m way too young to be mid-career … They don’t know that I’m working ’til I’m 90.”
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