Kadane was born in Washington, DC and raised in Freeport on Long Island, Kadane, prepared at Phillips Exeter Academy, earned an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford in 1966, under the supervision of Professor Herman Chernoff. While in graduate school, Kadane worked for the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). Upon finishing, he accepted a joint appointment at the Yale statistics department and the Cowles Foundation. In 1968, he left Yale and served as an analyst at CNA for three years. In 1971, he moved to Pittsburgh to join Morris H. DeGroot at Carnegie Mellon University. He became the second tenured professor in the Department of Statistics. Kadane served as department head from 1972 to 1981 and steered the department to a balance between theoretical and applied work, advocating that statisticians should engage in joint research in substantive areas rather than acting as consultants.[1]