The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at York University has recently welcomed three new faculty members in the area of statistics: Kevin McGregor, Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez, and Kelly Ramsay. The Department, based in the Faculty of Science, is now home to a dozen professors in statistics, specializing in big data, biostatistics and bioinformatics, statistical machine learning, and statistical methodology and theory.

The Department congratulates these individuals on their recent appointments and wishes them the best as they pursue their academic careers at York University.

Kevin McGregor

Kevin McGregor was appointed as an assistant professor in January 2021. He completed his PhD in biostatistics at McGill University under the supervision of Professor Celia Greenwood and Professor Aurélie Labbe.  His research has focused on various topics on statistical methods in genomics. In the past he has developed novel Bayesian methods to model community structure in the human microbiome by means of network and diversity estimation. He has also done work in methods for adjusting for cell-type heterogeneity in DNA methylation studies.

Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez

Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez was appointed as an assistant professor in July 2021. His research interests are in data science, machine learning, high-dimensional statistics, optimization and big data. He completed his PhD in mathematics (statistics-oriented) at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) under the supervision of Professor Sylvain Sardy in 2018. Subsequently, he was appointed as an assistant professor at the Universidad del Norte (Colombia). Most of his research contains both theoretical development and practical applications, with strong interdisciplinary components, and cloud and parallel computing implementations.

Kelly Ramsay

Kelly Ramsay was appointed as an assistant professor in July 2022, shortly after completing her PhD in statistics at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Professor Shoja Chenouri. She works mainly in robust statistics and nonparametric statistics. Under this umbrella, she has worked on functional data, change-point problems and data privacy. Some of her areas of application are medical imaging, such as f-MRI, finance, and speech recognition. She has also worked on data collection and web-scraping in the past.