Past DeGroot lecturers have been Donald B. Rubin, Adrian F.M. Smith, A. Philip Dawid, James O. Berger, Bradley Efron, Persi Diaconis, Sir David Cox , Steven Stigler, Larry Brown and Joseph B. Kadane.

Morris H. DeGroot came to Carnegie Mellon as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics in 1957 and was appointed founding Head of the Department of Statistics in 1966. In 1984, Morrie was named University Professor, which is the highest honor Carnegie Mellon bestows on a faculty member.

Morrie led an unusually active and productive academic life. He wrote three books, edited four volumes and authored over one hundred papers. He was the recipient of several awards, including the Otto Wirth Award for outstanding scholarship from the Roosevelt University Alumni Association. He was an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the International Statistical Institute, the Econometric Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Most of his research was on the theory of rational decision-making under uncertainty.

His Optimal Statistical Decisions helped educate a generation of statisticians and is one of the great books in the field. Published in 1970 and subsequently translated into both Russian and Polish, it provided an elegant and comprehensive treatment of a subject that has since come to be recognized as an essential part of statistics and of science as a whole. In 1975, his undergraduate text Probability and Statistics was published. A model of what a textbook should be, it played an important role in mathematical statistics curricula throughout the country