As I look back on the past year, what stands out most is how much the Society accomplished through the generosity of its members. Directors, committee volunteers, and our SSC office staff all gave freely of their time and expertise, and the results speak for themselves. Below are some of the highlights.

New faces (and a departure) at the SSC office

Christian Léger stepped into the role of SSC executive director on April 1, 2026. He has continued to represent Quebec on the board of directors alongside his new duties, and has hit the ground running with real energy and confident leadership.

Larysa Valachko (associate executive director), Clayton Forrest (electronic services administrator) and Michelle Benoit (executive assistant) have kept things running smoothly for the board and for our members all year, and I owe them genuine thanks—along with Angelo Canty (electronic services manager). Their steady work behind the scenes is vital to the smooth running of the SSC.

Jack Gambino stepped down as executive director this year. The Society is in strong shape thanks to what he built during his time in the role, and I'm grateful he's staying on with the office committee to help steer the reorganization and ease the handover. My best wishes to him in whatever comes next.

A busy year of initiatives

Several major projects moved forward this year, most of them the product of volunteer effort paired with support from the office—some brand new, others carried forward from the year before.

Financial sustainability. Building on the plan sketched out last year, we've now moved into implementation. The biggest piece was a restructuring of the SSC office, which included giving up our physical office space. The board approved updated rules for invited-speaker expenses back in November 2025, and section presidents have since been briefed on the change. Meanwhile, the executive and office committees found more cost-effective bookkeeping arrangements. Together, these steps should add up to meaningful savings for the Society going forward.

Mentorship program. Members responded well to the pilot mentorship program launched by the women in statistics committee, which prompted a closer look at scaling it up. Karen Kopciuk chaired an ad hoc mentorship program evaluation committee that studied whether the program could work Society-wide on a permanent footing, and concluded that it could. The board acted on that recommendation in May 2026, creating a standing SSC mentorship committee to carry the program forward. The new program, aimed at providing mentorship for members of the SSC unable to find suitable mentorship within their own places of employment, will be run in January 2027 for the first time. My thanks to Karen and her committee for their work, and to everyone who has already stepped up to serve on the new committee.

Accreditation. The accreditation committees spent much of the year tightening up our documentation and, notably, building a new online application system that should make applying considerably less cumbersome. Credit for this goes to cochairs John Koval and Peter MacDonald and their colleagues on the accreditation and accreditation services committees.

Canadian Journal of Statistics. After lengthy negotiation in a difficult market for academic publishing, we finalized a new agreement with Wiley for CJS. Rhonda Rosychuk and the ad hoc CJS publishing committee deserve real credit for getting this over the line. On the editorial side, the CJS team and publications committee launched a new “Applications and Case Studies” section and navigated a demanding migration from Scholar One to Wiley's Research Exchange platform—two significant undertakings, both handled well.

Education and communication planning. Chaired by Jim Stallard, the ad hoc education and communication planning committee spent the year mapping out how the Society coordinates outreach and education—including our activities on the Instats platform—and working out better ways to document and share those resources with members.

Committee chairs meetings. One change I'm particularly glad we made: regular virtual check-ins between the president and the chairs of every SSC committee. The idea is simple— help committees stay aware of what one another are doing, and build some connective tissue across the Society. We ran the first two sessions in November and December 2025 to a good response, and they're now a permanent fixture on the SSC calendar. Larysa Valachko deserves real credit for pushing this idea into practice.

Canadian Statisticians in Their Own Words. I also had the pleasure of writing a foreword, in my capacity as president, for Christian Genest's upcoming book Canadian Statisticians in Their Own Words—a collection built from interviews with leading Canadian statisticians, to be published by CRC Press. We have been given permission to post a PDF copy on the SSC website once it's available.

SSC annual meeting

McMaster University hosted our 53rd annual conference, SSC2026, and it came together beautifully. Credit for that goes above all to the local arrangements committee, cochaired by Angelo Canty and Katherine Davies, and to the student volunteers who put in long hours to keep things running smoothly. Johanna G. Nešlehová chaired a scientific program committee that put together a genuinely strong program—my thanks to her and to committee members Jean-François Bégin, Celia Greenwood, Dave Campbell, Joshua Speagle, Priscilla (Cindy) Greenwood, Harsha Perera, and Steve Matthews.

We were fortunate to host Robert Gramacy as our 2026 presidential invited speaker, and to mark Grace Yi's achievement as the 2025 gold medallist.

A great many other people made SSC2026 work: Angelo Canty again, in his electronic services manager capacity; office staff Clayton Forrest and Larysa Valachko; the chairs of our award committees—Shirley Mills (awards), Zhou Zhou (CRM-SSC Award), Mary Thompson (Lise Manchester Award), Bouchra Nasri (Pierre Robillard Award), Joanna Mills Flemming (SSC-CANSSI Impact Award), Léo Belzile (Statistics Educator Awards), Jiguo Cao (Student Travel Awards), and Pengfei Li (CJS Award); Thierry Chekouo Tekougang and the bilingualism committee; Chel Hee Lee and the Award for Case Studies in Data Analysis committee; Pingzhao Hu and the Student Research Presentation Awards committee; James McVittie and the New Investigators committee; and the executive committee and board of directors as a whole.

Canadian Statistics Student Conference (CSSC 2026)

McMaster also hosted the 14th Canadian Statistics Student Conference on May 30, 2026, and by any measure it was a hit—more than 35 talks spread across 10 themed sessions covering everything from Gaussian processes and Bayesian inference to machine learning, spatial statistics, and epidemiology, plus close to 40 posters. Dr. Kuan Liu (University of Toronto) ran a hands-on workshop on Bayesian methods for causal effect estimation, and Professor Grace Y. Yi (Western)—our 2025 gold medallist—gave a keynote on measurement error in high-dimensional data that was a real highlight of the day. A career panel with Dr. Anna Heath, Dr. Ben Bolker, and Dr. David Earn rounded things out.

Thanks to cochairs Mili Cortez (Alberta) and Jasper Zhongyuan Zhang (Toronto), to local organizers Angelo Canty and Katherine Davies, to the student and recent graduates committee, and to the many sponsors, volunteers, and judges who pitched in.

Departing executive and board members

Several executive committee members are finishing their terms, and I want to recognize them properly. Xin Gao (meetings coordinator) did excellent work lining up SSC and CSSC meeting logistics and locking in future venues. Wesley Yung (treasurer) managed the Society's finances carefully and thoughtfully throughout. And Erica Moodie (past-president) has quite simply been indispensable. Her advice and encouragement carried me through both my president-elect and president years, and I'm enormously grateful for her generosity in sharing what she's learned over her years of service to the SSC. Thank you, Erica. I'm also very happy to have passed the torch to Rhonda Rosychuk, who serves as president for 2026–2027, and who I have no doubt will do an absolutely terrific job.

Thanks as well to the board members whose terms are ending: Tessema Astatkie (Atlantic), Josée Dupuis (Quebec), Anne MacKay (Quebec), Michael Wallace (Ontario), Zhou Zhou (Ontario), Alexandre Leblanc (Manitoba–Saskatchewan–NWT–Nunavut), and Jeff Andrews (Alberta–BC). Their contributions over the past terms have mattered a great deal, and I thank them sincerely.

Serving as SSC president this past year has been one of the real privileges of my career, and working with the volunteers and members who make this Society what it is has been an absolute joy. Thank you all.

Rob Deardon

Past President of the SSC