of Logical Positivism. Hilbe secured a position at the University of Hawaii, where he retired as an emeritus professor of philosophy in 1990. During this time he authored several texts in philosophy and logic. In 1988 he earned a doctorate in statistics (applied mathematics, UCLA) and in 1990 was hired by the Health Care Financing Administration to develop statistical and data management tools for the study of Medicare data. Hilbe served as the founding editor of the Stata Technical Bulletin (predecessor to the Stata Journal) from 1991 to 1993, for which he developed a variety of statistical software commands, including the first generalized linear model (GLM) program having a negative binomial regression family (1993). The negative binomial family is now incorporated into the GLM routines of all major commercial statistical software. Hilbe is regarded as having popularized negative binomial regression, particularly in the disciplines of biostatistics and health outcomes analysis. It is now a standard method used for modeling overdispersed count data. Hilbe's 2007 text, Negative Binomial Regression, was the first text specifically devoted to the model and its many variations. His 2014 Modeling Count Data is regarded as the first text on applied count models. In 1992 Hilbe was appointed as an adjunct professor of Statistics in the Department of Sociology at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. In 2007 the Sociology department merged with several other departments to become the School of Social and Family Dynamics. Hilbe served in several corporate positions during the 1990s, including the positions of lead statistician for Genentech's National Registry for Myocardial Infarctions (NRMI-2;1996–97) and lead statistician for Hoffman-La Roche's Canadian National Registry for Cardiovascular Disease (FASTRAK;1997–99). During this period Hilbe played an important role in the formation of the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association, serving as a member of its initial executive committee and as a member of the founding scientific organizing committee (1995) for the International Conferences on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS). Hilbe was also one of the longest-serving editors for a publication of the American Statistical Association, holding the position of Software Reviews Editor for The American Statistician for twelve years from 1997 to 2009. Hilbe's long-term interest in astronomy and meteorites led to his selection in 2006 as a Solar System Ambassador with NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California commencing January 2007. In 2008 Hilbe initiated the International Statistical Institute's