Members of the SSC are hereby invited to volunteer or suggest names to fill positions in the SSC. A preliminary slate of candidates is to be presented in October by the election committee. Suggestions of names or nominations are requested for the following positions.

Members of the executive committee of the SSC (3-year terms)

President-elect: Rob Deardon

Rob Deardon is a professor of biostatistics with a joint position in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Calgary. He works predominantly in the area of infectious disease modelling and surveillance, but is also interested in Bayesian and computational statistics, experimental design, spatial models and statistical learning. He has supervised or co-supervised over 60 trainees at all levels, maintaining a research group of approximately 10–15 trainees over recent years. He has published 80+ papers in peer-reviewed journals and has served as associate editor of a number of journals, including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series C) and the Canadian Journal of Statistics. He served as the SSC Biostatistics Section president in 2021–2022, and also spent 4 years serving on the NSERC Discovery Grant Mathematics & Statistics Evaluation Group, 2 of those years as the chair of the Statistics Section.

Executive secretary: Henrik Stryhn

Henrik Stryhn is a professor in biostatistics at the Atlantic Veterinary College (AVC), University of Prince Edward Island. He came to AVC in 2001 from his native Denmark where he received his MSc in mathematical statistics (Univ. Copenhagen, 1988) and PhD (former Royal Veterinary and Agricultural Univ. Copenhagen, 1994). His main research interest lies in statistical modelling of hierarchically structured data, specifically within the Centre for Veterinary Epidemiological Research at AVC and also involving outreach activities in veterinary epidemiology through applied statistics courses and editorial work. He served as a regional representative for the Atlantic region on SSC's board of directors during 2016–2020, and as a member of the board of directors for AARMS (Atlantic Association for Research in the Mathematical Sciences) during 2012–2018. He currently holds the position of executive secretary for the SSC, after having been appointed by the board to complete the term of the elected executive secretary for the term 2021–2024.

Regional representatives on the board of directors (2-year terms)

Atlantic region (one representative)

Tessema Astatkie

Tessema Astatkie is a professor of statistics at the Faculty of Agriculture of Dalhousie University, and is a Professional Statistician accredited by the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) and the American Statistical Association (ASA). He received his PhD in statistics from Queen’s University. Tess conducts independent and collaborative research in several areas of statistics including regression analysis, and design and analysis of experiments. He collaborated with several researchers in 31 countries who specialise in agriculture, food processing, human nutrition, and post-harvest management. Manuscripts from these collaborations were published in over 100 different journals. He also provides statistical consulting services to the faculty members and graduate students of Dalhousie Agricultural Campus. Tess has been a member of SSC and ASA for more than 30 years and served on the accreditation committee of SSC from 2010 to 2014, on the accreditation committee of ASA from 2016 to 2022 (as a chair during the last year). He is currently the regional representative of Atlantic Canada on the board of directors of SSC and he is also the program chair of SSC 2024.

Quebec (two representatives)

Josée Dupuis

Josée Dupuis is the Strathcona Chair in Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University. She spent close to 20 years on the faculty at Boston University School of Public Health prior to joining McGill in 2022. Her research focuses on the development of statistical methods for genome-wide association, rare variant analysis, gene-environment interaction assessment, multi-omics integration, and their applications to diabetes and lung disease. She was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a fellow of the American Statistical Association for outstanding professional contributions to and leadership in the field of statistical science. She also served as president of the International Genetic Epidemiology Society. She holds a BSc in statistics from Concordia University and a MSc and PhD in statistics from Stanford University.

Anne MacKay

Anne MacKay received a PhD in actuarial science from the University of Waterloo in 2014. From 2014 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Risklab, ETH Zurich. From 2016 to 2021, she was an assistant professor, and then an associate professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Since 2021, she is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Finance at the Université de Sherbrooke. Her research interests include optimal stopping problems and numerical methods in finance and insurance mathematics. She is a member of Quantact, the Actuarial and Financial Mathematics Lab of the CRM.

Karim Oualkacha

Karim Oualkacha is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He received a BSc in mathematics and a MSc in statistics and operational research from Université Cadi Ayyad (Marrakech, Maroc), and a MSc and PhD in statistics from Université Laval. His research interests focus on statistical machine learning, high-dimensional statistics and modelling of multidimensional dependencies based on copula with applications in statistical genetics. He holds Junior 1 and 2 Scholar awards from the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Santé in multivariate modelling of high-dimensional genetics and genomics data. He is currently codirector of the Centre de recherche facultaire en statistique et science des données of UQAM (STATQAM) and he is the graduate program director of the Department of Mathematics of UQAM. He represents UQAM with CANSSI and serves as a member of the advisory board of CANSSI Quebec regional centre. He has served as a member of the NSERC Scholarships and Fellowships selection committee for Mathematical Sciences (2020–2023). He has served the SSC in various capacities since 2012—as member of the student travel grants committee from 2012 to 2015, member of student research presentation award committee, committee member of CRM-SSC Prize in Statistics, and institutional representative of UQAM within the SSC since 2016.

Ontario (two representatives)

Rafal Kulik

Rafal Kulik graduated from the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is currently a professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa. From 2016–2019 and 2022–2023 he served as chair of the department. His research interests are centred around limit theorems for stochastic processes with temporal dependence, extreme value theory and random graphs. He is associate editor for: Stochastic Processes and their Applications; Extremes; Electronic Journal of Statistics; and the Canadian Journal of Statistics.

Michael Wallace

Michael Wallace is an associate professor of biostatistics at the University of Waterloo, where he has been working since 2016. Originally from the U.K., Dr. Wallace received his PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2012, before moving to Canada to take up a postdoctoral position at McGill University. Outside research, which focuses on causal inference, precision medicine, and measurement error, Dr. Wallace has extensive experience in service roles related to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). He is a founding member of the SSC's EDI committee and has served on multiple EDI-related committees at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Wallace is also experienced in statistical communication. He has given dozens of radio and television interviews, is actively involved with the SSC's Liaison newsletter, and has served on the editorial board of Significance magazine for over a decade.

Zhou Zhou

Zhou Zhou obtained his PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago in 2009. He is currently a full professor at the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto. Zhou's major research interests lie in complex time series analysis, non- and semi-parametric inference, time-frequency analysis, change point analysis, and functional and longitudinal data analysis. Zhou received the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Award in 2021 and the CRM-SSC Prize in 2023.

 

Manitoba, Saskatchewan, N.W.T., Nunavut (one representative)

James McVittie

James McVittie is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Regina. He completed his undergraduate degree in mathematics and statistics at the University of Toronto and his graduate degrees (MSc and PhD) from McGill University. His research interests include the development of survival analysis modelling techniques for combined cohort data and measurement error problems in partially observed time to event data. He currently serves as the chair of the University of Regina statistical consulting service and as a member of the SSC committee on new investigators.

Alexandre Leblanc

Alexandre Leblanc obtained his PhD in statistics from the Université de Montréal. He is a professor and associate head in the Department of Statistics at the University of Manitoba, which he joined in 2003. His research interests are mainly focused on nonparametric methods and the robust analysis of high dimensional data, including function estimation, data depth, multivariate medians and their applications. He has served on many committees of the Society: the committee on bilingualism (2004–2007) and the travel awards committee for the annual meetings (2006–2007), the program committee (since 2010–2013 and 2015–2018) and the research committee (2011–2014). He has already been a regional representative (elected) on the SSC board for the region (2009–2011 and 2013–2015), was program chair for the 2012 annual meeting of the Society in Guelph, and was the local arrangements chair for the 2017 annual meeting of the Society in Winnipeg. Finally, he was involved in the creation of the Canadian Institute of Statistical Sciences (CANSSI) in his role of regional associate director representing Manitoba and Saskatchewan (2012–2018), and has served on many committees of the institute and on its board of directors (2012–2019).

Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon (one representative)

Bei Jiang

Bei Jiang is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences of the University of Alberta, a fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) and a Canada CIFAR AI chair. She received her PhD in biostatistics in 2014 from University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Alberta in 2015 as an assistant professor, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biostatistics at Columbia University from 2014 to 2015. Her main research interests focus on statistical integration of multisource and multimodal data, statistical disclosure control methods, and statistical learning methods for privacy protection and fairness. She has also worked closely with collaborators in women’s health, mental health, neurology, and industry partners to apply cutting-edge statistical learning methods to real-world applications.

Jeffrey L. Andrews

Jeffrey L. Andrews is associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus. He received his PhD from the University of Guelph in 2012 with a thesis that went on to win the 2013 Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Classification Society. Based on his research impacts in clustering methodology, he was given the Chikio Hayashi Award for Young Researchers from the International Federation of Classification Societies in 2017. Prior to joining UBC in 2015, Jeff spent 2 years as a faculty member at MacEwan University, and therefore has experience working as a faculty member in both Alberta and BC. Jeff has previously served the SSC on the committee for new investigators and as a student volunteer at the 2011 and 2012 meetings. Additionally, he has served several years on the board of directors for the Classification Society, and was elected president of that society for the 2024 and 2025 calendar years.

Section officers (3-year terms; 2-year terms for Survey Methods Section)

Actuarial Science Section

President-elect: Jean-François Bégin

Jean-François Bégin is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is a specialist in financial modelling as well as statistical and mathematical applications to finance and insurance. Before joining Simon Fraser University, he received his PhD from HEC Montréal in financial engineering. He is also a fellow of both the Society of Actuaries and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries. Over the past few years, his research program focused on the construction of complex models for long-term economic predictions, the understanding and management of credit risk, the modelling of option prices, and the development of sustainable retirement solutions and designs. During 2018–2021, he has served as the SSC Actuarial Science Section's treasurer.

Treasurer: Fangda Liu

Fangda Liu is an assistant professor at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo. She received a BSc in mathematics from the University of Hong Kong in 2009 and a PhD in actuarial science from the University of Waterloo in 2015. She is also an associated fellow of the Society of Actuaries. Her research focuses on optimal insurance and reinsurance design, risk sharing problems, distributional model uncertainty and its application in insurance.

Biostatistics Section

President-elect: Celia Greenwood

Celia Greenwood is senior investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research (www.ladydavis.ca). At McGill University, she holds a James McGill Professorship, is codirector of the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health (ludmercentre.ca), and also the inaugural and current graduate program director of the interdisciplinary PhD in quantitative life sciences (www.mcgill.ca/qls). Her research involves developing, improving, and applying statistical methods for genetic, genomic and high dimensional data, and her over 200 publications include both theoretical developments and applied collaborative projects, collectively cited over 18,000 times. She is a former president of the International Genetic Epidemiology Society (www.geneticepi.org) and received their Leadership Award in 2022.

Treasurer: Alexandre Bouchard-Côté

Alexandre Bouchard-Côté is a professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on computational Bayesian methods and applications in cancer genomics and phylogenetics.

Business and Industrial Statistics Section

President-elect: Dave Campbell

Dave Campbell is a full professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics and the School of Computer Science at Carleton University. Academically, he runs a collaborative team researching inferential algorithms at the intersections of statistics with machine learning, computing, and applied mathematics to solve problems inspired by industry and government collaborations. He has coauthored discussion papers in Bayesian Analysis and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (series B) and has been awarded over $3.5 million in research grants.

Dave’s career path maintains a theme of industrial collaborations. He spent 2021–2023 leading half the data science team at the Bank of Canada overseeing projects relating to cybersecurity, forecasting banknote demand, understanding drivers of inflation, ensuring data privacy, and more. Over the past 15 years, almost all of his grad students have had ties to industry and/or government.

Before moving to Ottawa in 2019, Dave was a professor at Simon Fraser University, where he led the creation of their BSc in data science. He was the inaugural president of the Data Science and Analytics Section of the Statistical Society of Canada and was a co-organizer of the Vancouver Learn Data Science Meetup. Dave was also the public relations officer for the SSC from 2016 to 2022.

Treasurer: Mateen Shaikh

Mateen Shaikh earned his PhD in statistics in 2013 at the University of Guelph. He was a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics from 2013 to 2017. Since 2017 he obtained a faculty appointment in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Thompson Rivers University, where he is currently associate professor. Mateen's previous service to the SSC has included the new investigators committee (2020–2023), chairing and organizing sessions at the SSC annual meetings, and various judging at these meetings.

Data Science and Analytics

President-elect: Joshua Speagle

Joshua Speagle is an assistant professor of astrophysics jointly appointed between the Department of Statistical Sciences and the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He is also an associate member of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics as well as a member of the Data Sciences Institute. He obtained his bachelor's degree with honours jointly in astrophysics and physics from Harvard in 2015. He also pursued his master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard in the area of astrostatistics, graduating in 2020. His postdoctoral research took him to the University of Toronto where he held both a Banting and Dunlap Fellowship. His current research focuses on using a combination of astronomy, statistics, and computer science to understand how galaxies, like our own Milky Way form, behave, and evolve over time. This often involves working with massive datasets from wide-field imaging and spectroscopic surveys containing observations ranging from billions of stars and galaxies to interstellar gas and dust.

Probability Section

President-elect: Priscilla (Cindy) Greenwood

Priscilla Greenwood (Cindy) received her PhD in mathematics from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1963, concentrating in probability and stochastic processes. She has been a member of the Department of Mathematics at UBC since 1966, emeritus, and continuing to be active since 2000. One of her main collaborations, with Wolfgang Wefelmeyer, of University of Cologne, centres on asymptotically efficient inference for stochastic processes. Another principal collaboration, with Lawrence Ward of UBC Department of Psychology, is about stochastic modelling of dynamics in the nervous system.

Statistical Education Section

President-elect: Harsha Perera

Harsha Perera is a teaching faculty in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU), and he is the faculty advisor and the undergraduate program chair in the department since 2019. Moreover, he is representing SFU Statistics in the British Columbia Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics and Statistics (BCcupms) since 2018 and serving as a committee member in the statistics education committee of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) since 2020.

Treasurer: Chelsea Uggenti

Chelsea Uggenti is a lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science (SAS) at the University of Waterloo and is the current director of the SAS teaching assistant (TA) program. She graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a BA in mathematics (2016), The University of Western Ontario with a MSc (2017) and PhD in statistics (2022), and received her A.Stat. designation from the Statistical Society of Canada in 2023. Chelsea is passionate about teaching, statistical education, and teaching assistant training.

Survey Methods Section

President-elect: Steve Matthews

Steve Matthews is assistant director of the Economic Statistics Methods Division at Statistics Canada. Steve received his master’s degree in statistics from Carleton University after completing his undergraduate studies in statistics and applied mathematics at the University of Manitoba. Since joining Statistics Canada in 1997, he has worked mainly on the design and support for economic statistics projects but also led the Time Series Research and Analysis Centre in the agency for several years. His main research interests include survey sampling, variance estimation and time series analysis.

Treasurer: Maryam Sohrabi

Maryam Sohrabi is a senior methodologist at Statistics Canada. She earned her PhD from the University of Ottawa and subsequently extended her academic horizons with a postdoctoral position at Carleton University.

Members of the accreditation committee (three positions, 3-year terms).

Eshetu G. Atenafu 

Eshetu G. Atenafu joined the Department of Biostatistics in November 2010, as a senior biostatistician to get involved in collaborative research at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto. Prior to joining the University Health Network, he was working as a biostatistician at the Hospital for Sick Children for more than 5 years and as a statistical analyst for 3 years. His involvement in such collaborative research includes design considerations of a study, analysis of data, interpretation of results, and preparation of manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals. He has more than 280 publications as an author/coauthor in the peer-reviewed medical and methodological journals. His primary work interests include survival data analysis, longitudinal data analysis, categorical data analysis, simulation study, change/break point analysis, and clinical trials at different levels of collaboration.

Jean-François Angers

Jean-François Angers, P.Stat since 2005, was a professor at Université de Sherbrooke from 1987 to 1990 and at Université de Montréal from 1990 until his retirement in fall 2018. During his time at Université de Montréal, he also served as head of undergraduate studies, department head, vice-dean and secretary of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. Jean-François has been very active in the Statistical Society of Canada. He was a member of the bilingualism committee (1994–1996 and 1999–2002), Quebec representative on the board of directors (1996–2000), responsible for translation of the annual meeting program (1996, 2001, and 2002), public relations officer (2002–2004), member of the accreditation committee (2006–2010) and the accreditation appeals committee (2016–2019), member of the Pierre Robillard Award committee (2007–2010), SSC representative on the program committee for the Joint Statistical Meeting (2013). He also served on the case studies committee (1994–1996, 1999–2002 and 2015–2016). He was secretary (2000–2002) and president (2003–2004) of the Statistical Society of Montreal.

Jenna Sykes

Jenna Sykes, P.Stat., is a research biostatistician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. Her current research interests include investigating international survival differences in cystic fibrosis and longitudinal data analysis. She has previously been a member of the accreditation committee (2019–2022, served as chair 2020–2021; 2023–present), accreditation services committee (2021–2022), and served on the student travel grants committee (2019–present). She received her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 2010 and 2008 respectively.

Member of the accreditation appeals committee 

One position will be elected for a 3-year mandate. Candidates must be P.Stat. members.

Banibrata Roy

Banibrata Roy is a hardcore statistician having BSc, MSc, MPhil. and PhD degrees in statistics, apart from receiving the honorary Professional Statistician (P.Stat.) qualification from the Statistical Society of Canada in March 2017. Working in the field of higher education for the last 28 years serving as faculty, researcher, consultant, assessment, and accreditation specialist, he has a wide range of research publications in statistical quality control, biostatistics, program evaluation, critical care and dementia. He also has a strong expertise in educational measurement and database administration, designing data-driven program evaluation skills in psychometric analysis, research design, reliability, and validity. On a more personal note, Dr. Roy has a variety of hobbies and interests including philately, playing chess, soccer, swimming, and a huge passion for teaching complex principles of statistics in a lucid, entertaining way.

I would like to thank the members of the SSC election committee for their help:

Jun Cai, Actuarial Science
Joseph Beyene, Biostatistics
Reza Ramezan, BISS
Tiffany Timbers, Data Science and Analytics
Shui Feng, Probability
Wesley Burr, Statistical Education
Wilson Lu, Survey Methods
Fabrice Larribe, Accreditation
Nancy Heckman, Appointed
Radu Craiu, Appointed

Derek Bingham, Appointed

Bruno Rémillard  
Chair of the election committee
Email: bruno.remillard@gmail.com