Dear SSC members,

It is hard to believe that we are already into May! 2024 is flying by—many of you have just finished grading, others are graduating and beginning professional careers or going on to further studies, and those of you in industry and government are dealing with onboarding new colleagues or collaborating with colleagues on several projects. SSC has been very busy, too. The board has an ad hoc committee to advise on investment strategy (contact bruno.remillard@hec.ca) and another ad hoc committee working on development of strategic plans (contact leo.belzile@hec.ca) for SSC activities. There are also four working groups looking into

• collecting more demographic data on the SSC membership form (chair therese.stukel@ices.on.ca),
• the role of statistics in data science and related data science accreditation issues (chairs eric.rancourt@statcan.gc.ca and saman.muthukumarana@umanitoba.ca),
• sponsorship of Florence Nightingale Day Canada (chair Katherine.Davies@mcmaster.ca), and
• the possibility of creating of a new early career award (chair Grace Yi gyi5@uwo.ca ).

We want your input, so, I encourage you to reach out to the chairs of these committees, ask questions, and share your ideas with them.

CSSC2024, the Canadian Statistics Students Conference, is happening on June 1 with organizers Kyle McRae and Yuan Bian. Congratulations on putting together a great program!

SSC2024 is following on June 3–5 with workshops on June 2, all at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. So far, we have over 525 registrations for SSC2024! Thanks to the scientific program committee led by Tess Astatkie and the cochairs of local arrangements, Asokan Mulayath Variyath and Zhaozhi Fan, and to SSC meeting coordinator Xin Gao for all your work! Please note for those attending the banquet, this year’s banquet is scheduled for Monday, June 3 evening rather than Tuesday evening (due to availability of the location). As a result, the Student Bar-b-q/networking event at SSC2024 will be on Tuesday evening this year. The banquet is currently sold out, so, if you register and do not yet have a ticket, please put your name on the wait list by contacting es-admin@ssc.ca. If you have a ticket and cannot use it, please turn it in at the SSC2024 registration desk so that someone on the wait list can be accommodated.

This issue of Liaison previews some of the award winners (congratulations!!!!) and invited sessions at SSC2024. Other award winners will be announced at the morning opening of SSC2024, and still others following the Gold Medal address. The presidential invited speaker this year is Dr. Karen Kafadar, Commonwealth Professor of Statistics at the University of Virginia, and chair of the statistics department there. A student of John Tukey, she has also worked at Indiana University and for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Hewlett Packard, the National Cancer Institute, the University of Colorado Denver, and Oregon State University.

Looking forward to sharing research and meeting many of you in St. John’s in early June!

Shirley Mills (shirleymills@cunet.carleton.ca)

SSC President 2023–2024