Joseph Hilbe, a prolific author in the field of statistical modeling, taught a number of Statistics.com courses right up until his death, in March of 2017. Hilbe was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association; his expertise was in statistical modeling. He did his writing with his beloved dog Sir on his lap; he authored books on logistic regression, count data modeling and negative binomial regression (the latter book becoming a standard in the field). He taught all these subjects at Statistics.com. He was also instrumental in helping (with James Hardin, also an instructor at Statistics.com) bring up to date implementations of these modeling techniques into Stata. In addition to his numerous contributions in statistics, Joseph had an abiding interest in astrostatistics and would happily show any visitor his treasured collection of meteorites. He was the founding President of the International Astrostatistics Association.
Known professionally in statistics and astrostatistics as Joseph Hilbe, he was an active athlete (track and field); in sports he went by “Joe Hilbe.” He won the national Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) pentathlon championships in 1968 and 1978, set the Hawaii state record for javelin, and went on to Div. 1 coaching assignments and other organizational duties. He was chair of the ISI sports statistics committee from 2007 to 2011 and chair of the Section on Statistics and Sports of the American Statistical Association in 2014.
https://aasjournals.github.io/aas-obits-mirror/joseph-m-hilbe-1944-2017.html
Obituary: Joseph M. Hilbe 1944–2017