Gerhard Svolba was born in Vienna, Austria. He studied business informatics and statistics at the University of Vienna and Technical University of Vienna and holds a master's degree. From 1995 till 1999, he was assistant professor in the department for medical statistics at the University of Vienna, where he completed his PhD on statistical quality control in clinical trials (the respective book is published in Facultas). In 1999 Gerhard joined SAS Institute Inc, where he specializes in analytics in different business and research domains. His project experience ranges from business and technical conceptual considerations to data preparation and analytic modeling across industries. He is also responsible for the analytical projects in SAS Austria for the analytical products and solutions SAS offers.
In 2003, on his way to a customer site to consult with them on data mining and data preparation, he had the idea to summarize his experience in written form. In 2004 he began work on Data Preparation for Analytics Using SAS, which was released by SAS Publishing in 2006. Since then he has spoken at numerous conferences on data preparation and teaches his class “Building Analytics Data Marts” at many locations. In 2012 the second book “Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS was published in SAS Press.
He likes to be in touch with customers and exchange ideas about analytics, data preparation, and data quality. Gerhard Svolba is the father of three teenaged sons and loves to spend time with them.