The Impact Award recognizes outstanding contributions by SSC members in collaborative research and applied work, the importance of which derives primarily from its relatively recent impact on a subject area outside of the statistical sciences, on an area of application, or on an organization. The award can be for published collaborative research, for collaboration in applied work (whether published or not) or, more generally, for the impact of a statistician on an organization (e.g., a company or a government agency) or a subject area through their collaborative or applied work.
Professor Charmaine Dean is recognized for her outstanding contributions to applied and collaborative statistical science. Throughout her career, she has developed innovative statistical methodology motivated by important problems in public health, environmental science, and natural resource management. Her work spans areas such as disease mapping, survival analysis, longitudinal data analysis, and spatiotemporal modelling, and has provided powerful tools for understanding complex biological and environmental systems. These methodological advances have been driven by close engagement with substantive scientific questions and have been widely adopted across multiple fields.
A defining feature of Professor Dean’s career is her sustained commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration. She has worked closely with clinicians, environmental scientists, and resource managers to develop statistical approaches that address real-world challenges. Her collaborative research has contributed to advances in understanding health outcomes following coronary bypass surgery, modelling wildfire occurrence and fire-season dynamics, and improving approaches to environmental risk assessment and monitoring.
Professor Dean has also provided important leadership within both the statistical and broader academic communities. She served as President of the Statistical Society of Canada and has mentored many students and collaborators throughout her career. Beyond the discipline, she has held senior university leadership roles, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Western Ontario from 2011 to 2016 and as Vice-President, Research & International at the University of Waterloo since 2017. These positions represent an extraordinary accomplishment for a statistician and serve as an important example and inspiration for women in the field.
“To Charmaine Dean, for outstanding contributions to applied statistical methodology, influential collaborative research addressing important challenges in health, environmental science, and natural resource management, and exemplary leadership in the statistical and broader academic communities.”