Keynote Speakers
Professor Elisabetta Carfagna
Keynote Speaker
Professor Carfagna is a full professor of statistics at the University of Bologna and has been since 2005. Professor Carfagna is also a delegate of the Rector for EXPO 2015 and she started her academic career after having reached, at the age of 28, a managerial position in the R&D department of a leading Italian company. She was shortlisted for the presidency of the Istat and for the positions of Director of FAO Trade and Markets Division and of FAO Statistics Division. She has designed and started up the implementation of the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics, the most relevant research and capacity development programme promoted by FAO, IFAD, World Bank, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank etc. and funded by BMGF, DIFID and EC. Since 1993, she has lead international research projects, in collaboration with several organizations, among which FAO, EUROSTAT, JRC, UNECE, US Department of Agriculture, Chinese Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Ethiopian CSO, Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Istat
Professor Di Cook
Keynote Speaker
Professor Cook is Professor of Business Analytics, in the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and the Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. Her research is in data science, data visualisation, exploratory data analysis, data mining, high-dimensional methods and statistical computing. "I love engaging in research, working with data, teaching, advising students and developing open source software".
My current work focuses on bridging the gap between statistical inference and exploratory graphics. We are doing experiments using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and eye-tracking equipment. We have found that we can crowd-source people to read plots that can provide statistical significance on visual discoveries. Its very exciting work. We can also use the crowd-sourcing methods to rigorously test whether one data visualisation design is better than another for communicating information.
Professor Sonja Greven
Keynote Speaker
Since 2014 Professor Greven has been Professor of Biostatistics at the LMU Munich from where she graduated in 2007. After a two year postdoc at Johns Hopkins University (USA), Sonja returned to the LMU and led an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group from 2010-2016, funded within the Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG). She is the recipient of the 2011 Gustav-Adolf-Lienert Award from the German Section of the International Biometric Society and the 2012 Wolfgang-Wetzel-Award from the German Statistical Society. Her main research field is statistical inference for complex data and inference in non-standard settings, including
- functional data analysis
- inference in generalized additive mixed models
- biostatistics
- longitudinal data analysis
- spatio-temporal statistics
- medical, epidemiological and other interesting applications.
Professor Louise Ryan
Keynote Speaker
After completing her undergraduate degree in statistics and mathematics at Macquarie University, Professor Ryan left Australia in 1979 to pursue her PhD in statistics at Harvard University in the United States. In 1983, Louise then took up a postdoctoral fellowship in Biostatistics, jointly between Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health. She was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1985, eventually becoming the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard. Louise returned to Australia in early 2009 to take up the role as Chief of CSIRO’s Division of Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics. In 2012, she joined University of Technology Sydney as a distinguished professor of statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences. Louise is well known for her methodological contributions to statistical methods for cancer and environmental health research. She is loves the challenge and satisfaction of multi-disciplinary collaboration. She has received numerous prestigous awards, most recently her 2012 election to the Australian Academy of Science.
Professor Jean Yang
Keynote Speaker
Professor Jean Yang is an applied statistician with expertise in statistical bioinformatics. She was awarded the 2015 Moran Medal in statistics from the Australian Academy of Science in recognition of her work on developing methods for molecular data arising in cutting edge biomedical research.Her research stands at the interface between medicine and methodology development and has centered on the development of methods and the application of statistics to problems in -omics and biomedical research. Shehas made contributions to the development of novel statistical methodologyand software for the design and analysis of high-throughput biotechnological data including that from microarrays, mass spectrometry and next generation sequencing.Recently, much of her focus is on integration of multiple biotechnologies with clinical data to answer a variety of scientific questions. This includes developiong various approches and methodolgies in statistical machine learning and network analysis. As a statistician who works in the bioinformatics area, she enjoys research in a collaborative environment, working closely with scientific investigators from diverse backgrounds.
Associate Professor Rachel Fewster
Keynote Speaker
Associate Professor Fewster is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Previously Rachel worked in CREEM, part of the Statistics Division of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Special Invited Speaker
Professor Elizabeth A. Thompson
Special Invited Speaker
Elizabeth A. Thompson is a professor in the Department of Statistics, and adjunct professor in the departments of Biostatistics and of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, and is Director of an Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate program in Statistical Genetics. She received her B.A. in mathematics and Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Cambridge University, UK and then did postdoctoral work in the Department of Genetics, Stanford University, before taking up a position on the faculty of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge in 1976. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in December 1985, as a professor of statistics, where she served as Chair 1989-1994, and now also again 2011-2014. Dr. Thompson's research is in the development of methods for model-based likelihood inference from genetic data, particularly from data observed on large and complex pedigree structures both of humans and of other species, and including inference of relationships among individuals and among populations. Her research funding includes an NIH award initiated in 1991, which has been an R37 MERIT award since 2008. Dr. Thompson is a recipient of a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Cambridge, the Jerome Sacks award for cross-disciplinary research from the National Institute for Statistical Science, the Weldon Prize for contributions to Biometric Science from Oxford University, UK, and of a Guggenheim fellowship. She has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the Banff International Research Station, and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, and on the National Research Council Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics and on the Committee to Review the Scientific Approaches used during the FBI's investigation of the 2001 Anthrax letters. She is currently President-elect of the International Biometric Society, having previously served on committees of the Society, including 8 years as a member of Council. Dr. Thompson is an honorary fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the US National Academy of Sciences.