Joseph Michael Hilbe was an American statistician and philosopher, founding President of the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA) and one of the most prolific authors of books on statistical modeling in the early twenty-first century. Hilbe was an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), for which he founded the ISI astrostatistics committee in 2009. Hilbe was also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and Full Member of the American Astronomical Society.