Mark Glickman, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, is senior lecturer on statistics at the Harvard University Department of Statistics, and senior statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a Veterans Administration Center of Innovation. His research interests are primarily in the areas of statistical models for rating competitors in games and sports, and in statistical methods applied to problems in health services research.
Glickman's long-standing interest in methods for rating competitors in games and sports arose from his involvement in playing tournament chess, where he attained the title of US national master in 1988. Glickman is known for having invented the Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems, both of which have been adopted by many gaming organizations internationally.
Glickman has served as chair and program chair for the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Sports, and has earned its award for Sports Statistician of the Year in 2009. He has co-founded and co-organizes the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports, a bi-annual conference on the research and practice of applying statistical methods in sports. He is editor-in-chief for the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. At Harvard, he is the founding head of the new Lab for Sports Analytics.
Many of Glickman's publications have been in the realm of health services research. In the mid-1990s, Glickman's work critiquing the resource-based relative value scale algorithm for the Medicare fee schedule led to his consultation to government agencies in Ontario and Alberta to develop a statistical approach for medical fee schedule construction. He has received National Institutes of Health and Veterans Affairs grants to study the genetic predisposition to disease onset for various cardiovascular diseases, and for studying the impact of medication adherence on health outcomes.
