CANSSI National Seminar Series

CANSSI is organizing a national seminar series for 2020–2021 to unite the statistics community across Canada. Seminars will be held approximately once per month between September and April and will be broadcast nationally. CANSSI will encourage the participation of graduate students by supporting journal groups at each institution. Speakers will send out a relevant paper for the groups to discuss prior to each seminar, and students will have the chance to meet with the speakers following their talk. Further information about the seminar series is available on the CANSSI website at http://www.canssi.ca/canssi-national-seminar-series/.

New Faces at CANSSI

CANSSI welcomes our new deputy director Andrea Benedetti from McGill University. Andrea is an associate professor, jointly appointed in the departments of Medicine and Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University. Learn more about Andrea here.

CANSSI's incoming deputy director Andrea Benedetti

 

We’ve also got six new board members, one who is returning for a second term. We’re looking forward to having them “on board.” They are Tim Hesterberg (Google), Karen Kopciuk (University of Calgary), Shili Lin (Ohio State University), Eric Rancourt (Statistics Canada), Nancy Reid (2nd term, University of Toronto), and Xuebin Zhang (Environment and Climate Change Canada). Read the full story here.

Incoming CANSSI board members

 

We owe many thanks to our outgoing board members: Wesley Yung, Arvind Gupta, Joan Hu, Michael Boehnke, and Valérie Bécaert. We also owe an especially big thank you to our outgoing deputy director John Braun. John was in this position for five years. His long-term leadership and devotion to the Canadian statistics community have been enormously valuable to all Canadians.

Outgoing CANSSI board members

 

Thank you to outgoing CANSSI deputy director John Braun

 

Collaborative Research Teams

Our last call for letters of intent attracted 15 LOIs, the highest number to date. These LOIs propose collaborations with actuaries, biologists, biomedical engineers, cancer researchers, civil engineers, climate scientists, computer scientists, economists, epidemiologists, financial analysts, kinesiologists, physicists, and psychologists. These are currently being reviewed. After the review process, several of these teams will be invited to submit a full proposal.

 

CANSSI Town Hall Meeting

On June 18, we had our first virtual town hall meeting. The topic was “Overview of the CANSSI Proposal to the NSERC Discovery Institute Support (DIS) Program.” We were pleased to have 70 statisticians from across Canada attend this town hall. At its heart, CANSSI is a grassroots organization and input from statisticians across the country is essential. Our efforts to include the country’s statisticians began last August. we undertook a campaign of visiting universities across Canada to talk to faculty, students, and administration.  We have been soliciting input from various groups and individuals by direct contact. Most recently, we organized the CANSSI Strategic Retreat in March (report here). This town hall meeting was the last event in the open community part of the process. Small teams of writers are now working on various aspects of the proposal, which will then be put together into what we hope will be a competitive, compelling, and coherent proposal.

We want to thank all those who took the time to speak with us and participate in our various events.

 

CANSSI Rapid Response Program—COVID-19

CANSSI’s Rapid Response Program is designed to support CANSSI members who are in the position to provide critical research support on rapidly emerging problems important to society on a provincial, national, and/or international scale. The program is focused on applied research that has strong potential to have an immediate impact.

We’re still accepting applications. Learn more about how to apply and about some of the proposals that we’ve funded here.