Executive Committee (Three-year Terms)
President-Elect
Donald L. McLeish
Don McLeish obtained a B.A. from Queen's University, an M.Sc. from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Probability from McGill University. Subsequently he held a Post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago and taught at York University, the University of Alberta, Universities of Auckland, Michigan, and ETH Zürich. He is Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and Director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Finance at the University of Waterloo. He is author of three books and has worked on martingale central limit theory, stochastic processes, estimating functions, missing data problems and simulation and finance. He was the recipient of the SSC Gold Medal in 2007. Service over the years includes membership of the SSC Board of Directors (1985-87), Special Awards Committee of the SSC, member and Chair of the COPSS Committee, Associate Editor and Editor of The Canadian Journal of Statistics, Chair of the SSC Annual Meeting Program, member of the University of Waterloo Senate, member and Chair of the NSERC Statistical Science Grant Selection Committee, Appraisal Committee for the Ontario Council of Graduate Studies, etc. He is a member of ASA and the ISI, and a fellow of the IMS. He hopes that the SSC can help maintain the delicate balance on the supporting pillars of our discipline: research and innovation in the statistical sciences, teaching and dissemination of knowledge in a broader context, consulting and the contribution of our discipline to progress in the health sciences, business and finance, science, and the common good.
Executive Secretary
Julie Trépanier
Julie Trépanier has been an Assistant Director in the Household Survey Methods Division of Statistics Canada since 2006. Earlier, she worked in the Business Survey Methods Division as a Methodologist (1992-97), a Senior Methodologist (1997-2000), a Section Chief (2000-04) and Assistant Director (2004-06). She has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Université de Sherbrooke. She pursued graduated studies in public administration at the École nationale d'administration publique from 1998 to 2000. She is one of the founders of the Association des statisticiennes et statisticiens du Québec, was a member of the first Executive Committee and launched the ASSQ newsletter Convergence in 1996. She is the current President of the SSC Survey Methods Section. She was a member of the organizing committee for the Third International Conference on Establishment Surveys that was held in Montréal in June 2007, and for the Statistics Canada International Symposium on Methodological Issues in 2004. She is the current co-chair of a similar Symposium to be held in 2009.
Meetings Co-ordinator
Duncan J. Murdoch
Duncan Murdoch is a Professor in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at the University of Western Ontario. He is Program Secretary of the SSC for 2008-09, and was previously Secretary of the Society from 2000 to 2004. He has been a member of the R Core development team since 2003, and was on the Management Committee of the Current Index to Statistics from 2003 to 2007, chairing it in the last three years. He believes that the annual meeting is the single most important activity of the SSC, and as a voting member of the Executive Committee he will push to support it. He will also encourage tutorials and small meetings in the regions.
Treasurer
John J. Koval
John Koval is Professor of Biostatistics and also the Graduate Chair in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Western Ontario. After receiving his B.Math. and M.Math. in Statistics from the University of Waterloo, he travelled to England to study at Imperial College, where he earned an M.Phil. in Statistics from the University of London. He returned to the other London, where he obtained a Ph.D. from the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at Western. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Waterloo, he held faculty appointments in the Departments of Mathematics and of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at Western. His research interests include epidemiological regression models, models for panel data, and the handling of missing data. He has been funded as a Principal Investigator by the National Cancer Institute of Canada, from which he has received grants to conduct a 10-year cohort study looking at psychosocial factors in smoking in adolescents and young adults. He has been a member of the SSC since the early 1980's and served as a member of several SSC consulting services committees. He was Treasurer of the Biostatistics Section from 2000 to 2007. Currently he is a member of the Accreditation Appeals Committee.
Regional Representatives (Two-year Terms)
Atlantic Provinces (one to be elected)
Hugh A. Chipman
Hugh Chipman has been a tier-II Canada Research Chair in Acadia University's Department of Mathematics and Statistics since 2004. His graduate degrees are from the University of Waterloo, where he was also on faculty for seven years. He was awarded a P.Stat. in 2006. His research interests include Bayesian methods, applications, data mining and statistical learning. He has been actively involved in MITACS and NICDS research teams, co-leading the latter since 2004. He served on the NSERC Statistical Sciences Grant Selection Committee from 2005 to 2008, serving as Chair in his final year. He is an Associate Editor for Technometrics and SSC Liaison, and previously served on Editorial Boards for The Canadian Journal of Statistics and Statistics and Computing. He has served on the Pierre Robillard Award Selection Committee and has been an Atlantic Canada representative on the SSC Board of Directors. He is the Society's Electronic Services Manager since the beginning of 2009.
Renjun Ma
Renjun Ma is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New Brunswick. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of British Columbia in 1999 and was a postdoc at the University of Ottawa. His primary research interests focus on random effects modelling of multilevel, longitudinal and spatial data. He also works on health risk assessment of air pollution with epidemiologists and childhood development with social and health scientists, respectively. Renjun is the SSC Local Representative for the University of New Brunswick.
Québec (two to be elected)
Hélène Bérard
Hélène Bérard studied at Université Laval, where she obtained a Bachelor's degree in Biology in 1985 and a Master's degree in Marine Biology in 1988. After working for a few months for Fisheries and Oceans Canada at the Institut Maurice-Lamontagne in Rimouski, she completed a Master's degree in Statistics at Queen's University in 1990. She was hired the same year by Statistics Canada and has now being working for over 18 years as a survey methodologist. She is presently a section chief in the Household Survey Methods Division. She was a member of the SSC Bilingualism Committee from 2004 to 2008 and she chaired that committee from 2005 to 2008.
Aurélie Labbe
Aurélie Labbe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University since January 2009. From 2004 to 2008, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Université Laval. She did her undergraduate studies in Applied Mathematics at the Université Paris-Dauphine. She then obtained a Master's degree in Statistics from the Université de Montréal and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in 2005, under the supervision of Mary Thompson. Her research interests are in Biostatistics, and more specifically in Statistical Genetics (microarray data analysis, genetic epidemiology, genetic linkage and association studies and quantitative traits analysis). She is also a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montréal. Since 2006, she has served the SSC as a member of the Student Travel Award Committee and The Canadian Journal of Statistics Award Selection Committee.
Ernest Monga
Ernest Monga is professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at the Université de Sherbrooke. He started working there in 1991 after completing his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the Université de Montréal in 1990. He was a member of the Pierre Robillard Award Selection Committee from 1999 to 2001. In 1998, he was Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee for the 26th Annual Meeting of the SSC, held at the Université de Sherbrooke. In 1994, he was a member of the founding committee of the Association des statisticiennes et statisticiens du Québec. His research focuses on nonparametric methods and large-dimension data analysis. He is a member of the Université de Sherbrooke Data Prospection Laboratory (ProspectUS).
Jean-François Quessy
Jean-François Quessy is Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. He completed a Master's (2001) and a Ph.D. (2005) in Statistics at Université Laval. His research concentrates on nonparametric methods for analyzing, modeling and measuring multivariate dependence. His favorite fields of application are hydrology, climatology, finance and actuarial science. Since 2006, he is the Editor of Convergence, the newsletter of the Association des statisticiennes et statisticiens du Québec. He became a member of the SSC Bilingualism Committee in 2008.
Ontario (two to be elected)
Laurent Briollais
Laurent Briollais is a scientist at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, since October 2000. He is specialized in Biostatistics and Statistical Genetics. He is also an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto. His areas of interest include statistical genetics, sequential approaches, robust statistics, multivariate survival analysis and the applications of statistics to various biomedical problems, in particular to elucidate the genetic basis of complex human diseases. Some of his recent research activities include penetrance function modeling in family-based studies using multivariate survival analysis, the use of Bayesian graphical models to study complex patterns of genetic associations between genetic variants and their relation to disease, the use of sequential designs in genomics experiments, the development of robust methods for variance analysis in familial studies, as well as the development of efficient designs and statistical methods in the context of genome-wide association studies. This methodological work has led to various applications, including studies on breast cancer, colorectal cancer, endometrial cancer, melanoma, prostate cancer, alcohol dependence, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Edward J. Chen
Edward J. Chen has been employed at Statistics Canada since 1986. He is a chief in the Household Survey Methods Division and devotes his career to the excellence of this program. He is currently responsible for sample control and maintenance for the Canadian Labour Force Survey and other household surveys. He holds an M.Sc. in Mathematics (Statistics) from Carleton University and is very active in the statistical and local communities. Since July, 2005, he is the Treasurer and a member of the Executive Committee of the SSC. In addition to having served in several SSC committees, he is currently an elected member of the SSC Accreditation Appeals Committee and also an Associate Editor of SSC Liaison. He was Treasurer of the Statistical Society of Ottawa from 1999 to 2003. Other volunteer experiences include President and Treasurer of Tunney's Daycare, and Treasurer of Broadview School in Ottawa.
Alison L. Gibbs
Alison Gibbs is a teaching-stream faculty member in the Department of Statistics at the University of Toronto. After completing her Ph.D. in 2000 at the University of Toronto, she held post-doctoral and Assistant Professor positions at York University. In her current position she has taught a variety of probability and statistics courses, ranging from a first-year seminar to a graduate course in statistical consulting. Her responsibilities include overseeing and advising the department's Statistical Consulting Service. She has been active in the SSC through the Statistics Education Committee (member since 2004 and Chair since 2007) and through the Case Studies in Data Analysis at the Annual Meeting (organizer since 2005, Chair of Case Studies Awards implementation committee in 2007, and member of the Case Studies Awards Committee since 2008). She is currently an Associate Editor of SSC Liaison.
Steven Wang
Steven Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at York University. He received his B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Beijing Institute of Technology in 1991 and M.Sc. in Applied Statistics from University of California at Riverside in 1996. He obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Jim Zidek and Contance van Eeden. He also did one year post-doc with Ruben Zamar and Raymond Ng at the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Science and Insightful Inc. from 2001 to 2002. His research interests include likelihood inference, data mining, and bioinformatics.
Manitoba-Saskatchewan-N.W.T.-Nunavut (one to be elected)
Alexandre Leblanc
Alexandre Leblanc obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics from the Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Jean-François Angers. Since June 2003, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Manitoba. In recent years, his research has focused on nonparametric function estimation using frequentist and Bayesian methods, including adaptive methods, asymptotic properties and limit laws, and robustness. He is also interested in computational statistics and stochastic processes. He has been a member of the SSC for seven years, serving on two of its committees: the Bilingualism Committee (2004-07) and the Travel Awards Committee (2006-07). At the University of Manitoba, he has chaired the committee responsible for graduate studies in Statistics from 2005 to 2007, and served on many internal committees responsible for bursaries, scholarships and other awards within the Faculty of Science and within the Faculty of Graduate Studies, including NSERC scholarships.
Alberta - B.C. - Yukon (one to be elected)
Farouk Nathoo
Farouk Nathoo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Victoria. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of British Columbia (1998), an M.Math. in Statistics from the University of Waterloo (2000), and his Ph.D. in Statistics from Simon Fraser University (2005). His research interests lie in the development of methods for spatial and longitudinal data, focusing on hierarchical models, with applications in forestry and spatial epidemiology.
Matías Salíbian-Barrera
Before being hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia in 2004, Matías was an Assistant Professor at Carleton University. Further back in time, he worked as a Research Scientist for MathSoft (currently Insightful Co.) in Seattle, a member of the development team in charge of the robust library for S-PLUS. Matías was born in Santiago de Chile. He got his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires, and his Ph.D. in Statistics from UBC. He has been an active member of the SSC New Investigators Committee since its beginnings in 2006, and is now Chair of the local organizing committee for the 2009 SSC Annual Meeting. His scientific curiosity is currently focused on robustness issues, particularly in trying to incorporate uncertainty due to possible model-misspecification into inferential procedures. Add a pinch of computational challenges associated with these problems and you will get a good picture of his research interests.
Biostatistics Section
President-Elect
Lisa M. Lix
Lisa Lix is Associate Professor and Centennial Chair in the School of Public Health at the University of Saskatchewan; she is also an Associate member of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at that university. Her current research focuses on methods for chronic disease case ascertainment using administrative health data, quality of administrative data, and methods for the analysis of longitudinal quality of life data. She collaborates widely on projects about population health, health services use, and the association between chronic disease and quality of life. Prior to joining the University of Saskatchewan, she was a member of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba (2002-08) and served as Associate Director, Repository at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (2006-08) and Director of the Biostatistical Consulting Unit (2005-08). She has served on the SSC Board of Directors since 2005.
Treasurer
Patrick E. Brown
Patrick Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and a Scientist in the Research Unit at Cancer Care Ontario, the province's cancer agency. Prior to this, he spent 10 years in the United Kingdom, completing his Ph.D. and subsequently working at Lancaster University. His research focuses on the development of models and methodology for spatio-temporal data and spatial point processes, longitudinal random effects models, and multi-state models. These tools are applied to problems in public health and disease mapping, forest ecology, veterinary epidemiology, and health services research. He is currently an Associate Editor of Applied Statistics, and was chair of a Royal Statistical Society local group for many years.
Business and Industrial Statistics Section
President-Elect
William J. Welch
Will Welch joined the Department of Statistics at the University of British Colunbia as a Professor in 2003. He was Head of the Department from 2003 until June 2008. Prior to coming to UBC, he was a Professor at the University of Waterloo. He also holds the honorary title of Visiting Professor in the Business School, Loughborough University, UK. His research has concentrated on statistical methods for science and engineering via computer experiments, quality improvement, and the analysis of drug-discovery and genotyping data from high-throughput screening. He co-presented a short course on computer experiments sponsored by the Business and Industrial Statistics Section at the 2002 Annual Meeting and was SSC member of the 2003-04 JSM Program Committee. He is on the editorial boards of the Annals of Applied Statistics and The Canadian Journal of Statistics.
Treasurer
Marc Fredette
Marc Fredette is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management Sciences at HEC Montréal. He obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Waterloo in 2004. His research interests are mainly centered around the analysis of event-history data and recurrent-event data. Since 2004, he has been involved with the SSC in different capacities, e.g., as a member of the Bilingualism and Membership Committees, and as a Local Representative for HEC Montréal.
Probability Section
President-Elect
Yiqiang Q. Zhao
Yiqiang Zhao is a Full Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University, and was the former Director of the School from 2004 to 2007. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1990. His extensive administrative experience includes that as a member of Carleton University Senate, as Executive of the Faculty Association (Winnipeg), and also as Chair or Vice-Chair of various committees at different levels. He has been very actively involved with professional society/community work, such as serving as a former President of the Canadian Operational Society, Manitoba Sector. He is a dedicated teacher, and has taught approximately 30 different courses at various undergraduate and graduate levels. He was awarded the Carleton Faculty of Science Teaching Award for 2002-03. His research interests are in applied probability and stochastic processes, with particular emphasis on computer and telecommunication network applications. He is currently an Editor of the journal Stochastic Models, and an Associate Editor of the journals Queueing Systems and OR Letters.
Survey Methods Section
President-Elect
Pierre Lavallée
Pierre Lavallée studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. He joined Statistics Canada in 1985 as a survey methodologist. He completed a Master's Degree in 1988 at Carleton University. In 1990-91, he worked on business panel surveys at Eurostat in Luxembourg. In 1997, he became Chief of the Labour and Tax Data Section at Statistics Canada. In 2001, he completed a Ph.D. at the Université libre de Bruxelles. His thesis led to the publication of two books: « Le sondage indirect, ou la méthode généralisée du partage des poids » (Éditions Ellipses), and « Indirect Sampling » (Springer). Since 2005, he is Assistant Director in the Social Survey Methods Division. A member of the SSC, he is a former President of the Association des statisticiennes et statisticiens du Québec and has served the International Statistical Institute and the International Association of Survey Statisticians in various capacities.
Secretary
Cynthia Bocci
Cynthia Bocci is a mathematical statistician at Statistics Canada. She is an active member of the SSC, the ASA and the Statistical Society of Ottawa (SSO). She served as Secretary of the SSO from 2003 to 2007. Currently, she sits on four committees of the SSC: she is Chair of the Bilingualism Committee, Secretary of the Survey Methods Section, and a member of the Accreditation Committee and of the Committee of Women in Statistics. She received the P.Stat. designation in 2006. Her studies include a PhD. from the University of Ottawa, completed in 1999, a BComm. in Mathematics at McGill University and an M.Sc. in Statistics from Concordia University. Since 2000, she has worked on survey methodology applied to household and business surveys. Her current research interests include the handling of non-response in sample surveys and disclosure avoidance using synthetic data. She would very much appreciate the opportunity to renew her term as Secretary of the Survey Methods Section.