Rate My Professor Brenton Clarke

Brenton Clarke serves as Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics, Statistics, Chemistry and Physics at Murdoch University, where he commenced his academic career in 1984. He obtained his PhD in 1983 from the University of Western Australia, with a dissertation entitled "Robust Estimation: Limit Theorems and Their Applications," building on his BSc foundation. Clarke's research focuses on robust statistics, encompassing M-functionals, Fréchet differentiability, outlier detection, adaptive estimation, linear models, and their applications to diverse fields including biology, medicine, extractive metallurgy, and veterinary science. His work emphasizes theoretical advancements in statistical robustness and practical methodologies resistant to data contamination.

Clarke's scholarly output includes two key books: "Linear Models: The Theory and Application of Analysis of Variance" (John Wiley & Sons, 2008) and "Robustness Theory and Application" (John Wiley & Sons, 2018). Prominent publications feature "Uniqueness and Fréchet Differentiability of Functional Solutions to Maximum Likelihood Type Equations" (Annals of Statistics, 1983; 156 citations), "Nonsmooth Analysis and Fréchet Differentiability of M-Functionals" (1984; 97 citations), "Outcomes of Usual Chiropractic. The OUCH Randomized Controlled Trial of Adverse Events" (Spine, 2013; 82 citations), and "Trimmed Likelihood Estimation of Location and Scale of the Normal Distribution" (Australian Journal of Statistics, 1993; 58 citations). He has supervised PhD theses such as those by Daniel Schubert (2006, multivariate adaptive trimmed likelihood) and Ross Bowden (2018, joint autoregressive moving average processes). In 2023, Clarke received the Statistical Society of Australia Service Award for his contributions. He chairs the subcommittee for the Frank Hansford-Miller Fellowship of the SSA Western Australia Branch and has delivered colloquia, including at the University of North Carolina.