Another Nobel prize winning research using Stan

Nobel prize and other science prices are problematic and this is not endorsement of such prices, but this might be useful for someone who needs to tell (hype) about the impact of Stan (or just as another funny fact about Stan).

Previously Stan was used in the the LIGO gravitational wave research awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

In 2020 half of the the Nobel Prize in Physics was given jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/. There is at least one paper “Relativistic redshift of the star S0-2 orbiting the Galactic Center supermassive black hole” co-authored by Andrea Ghez https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6454/664.full, using Stan to validate their Bayesian modeling results (and using elpd for model comparison, but it’s not mentioned whether loo or ArviZ was used). (Since this paper was published in 2019, use of Stan didn’t probably have causal effect for the prize, or maybe the prize committee was convinced only after this paper as it used Stan? 🤔)

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Anyone know these folks? As someone involved in the ‘hype’ business, grant writing, I’d like to know more. Also what are the other Nobel uses?

Thanks for letting us know.

Breck

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