Blaza Toman

Blaza Toman was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1975. She studied Mathematics and Statistics, earning a Ph.D. in Statistics from the Ohio State University in 1987 with a specialization in Bayesian Optimal Design. She taught statistics at the graduate and undergraduate level at Rutgers University and at the George Washington University and was a consultant to several medical device companies on Bayesian clinical trial design and analysis. In 2000 she became a member of the Statistical Engineering Division at NIST. Her main research interests remain Bayesian statistical methods.

At NIST, she became interested in uncertainty assessment for measurements in the physical sciences, and more generally in statistical methods relevant to metrology. Here she collaborates with scientists in several fields, for example: in BFRL, analyzing data from fire models and virtual cement models; in CSTL, analyzing gas chromatography and mass spectrometry data; and in PL, analyzing data on spectral responsivity of photodiodes. She also collaborates with her colleagues in SED to develop statistical methods for interlaboratory studies and key comparisons, and for uncertainty analysis of virtual measurements.

Technical Areas of Research and Consulting:

• Experiment design (in particular, Bayesian optimal experimental design)
• Bayesian analysis