Ian MACNEILL, 1931-2019
Professor MacNeill received his undergraduate education in mathematics at the University of Saskatchewan and his graduate education in statistics at Stanford University. After several years at the University of Toronto, he was appointed Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario in 1971 and Professor in 1978.
As Director of the Statistics and Actuarial Science group at Western, he coordinated efforts to form the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, for which he was Chair from 1980 to 1992. He served as Program Chair for the first Annual Meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada, held in London, Ontario, 1978. He founded the consulting unit STATLAB, and directed it from 1977 to 1992.
His many accomplishments include over 150 presentations in at least 23 countries, and over 100 publications. He has worked in time series, econometrics and the change-point problem, with extensive applications ranging from problems in environmental science to the forecasting of health care needs.
Professor MacNeill is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Member of the International Statistical Institute, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality Control. In 1995, he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Medal of the American Statistical Association on Statistics and the Environment. He was a founding Vice-President of the International Environmetrics Society.
“To Ian B. MacNeill, for fundamental scholarly contributions, ranging from groundbreaking work on the change-point problem and the concept of residual processes for regression models to innovative methodology for monitoring and forecasting chronic disease incidence; and for fostering the advancement of the statistical sciences in his university, in Canada, and in the larger sphere.”