Bovas Abraham

Bovas Abraham is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. He is the founding president of the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics and is also the founding president of the ‘Business and Industrial Statistics Section’ of the Statistical Society of Canada. Bovas was also the Director of the Institute for Improvement in Quality and Productivity at the University of Waterloo for nearly ten years and has been a consultant and teacher with the Institute since its inception.

Bovas has been a faculty member at the University of Waterloo in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science since 1977. Bovas received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Kerala in India, his Masters from University of Guelph, Canada and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, U.S.A.

Bovas has extensive experience in the academic world as an administrative leader, a scientist, a mentor and an educator. He has been involved in graduate training in Statistics since 1977 teaching graduate courses, and supervising Masters and Ph. D students. He has published extensively in the major statistical journals. Bovas has been involved as a trainer and consultant in a wide range of statistical applications in industry in Canada and the United States. Some of these companies include: General Motors, Standard Products, Wescast Industries, Imperial Oil, Nortel Networks, and BF Goodrich. In addition to extensive consulting and teaching experience in the automotive industry, Bovas has been involved in consulting for the Ministry of the Environment.

His main areas of interest include Quality Improvement, and the management and implementation of statistical procedures such as Designed Experiments, SPC, and Time Series Analysis. He is co-author of the books “Statistical Methods for Forecasting”, and “Introduction to Regression Modeling”, and the editor of a volume “Quality Improvement through Statistical Methods”.

Bovas is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and a member of the Statistical Society of Canada.

Paul Cabilio

Paul Cabilio was appointed professor emeritus on his recent retirement from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Acadia University where he has worked since obtaining his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1973. Earlier he completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc from McGill University. He has served as Head of the Department for several terms and has served as Acting Dean of Science for one year. He has been active in various roles in the SSC. He was Chair, local arrangements committee for the SSC Meeting at Acadia in June 1993, has served three terms on the Board of Directors and seven years as Program Secretary, as well as serving on other SSC committees. Since May 2006 he has served as Secretary of the SSC. His present research interests include non-parametric methods in general, and rank based methods in particular. He is also interested in applications and in teaching strategies and methods for undergraduate statistics.

Angelo Canty

Angelo Canty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University. He obtained a B.Sc. in statistics and computer science from University College, Cork, Ireland, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His research interests are in the bootstrap and other computational methods for inference. Most recently he has been applying these methods to the analysis of genetic microarray data with scientists at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children on a Genome Canada funded study into Type 1 Diabetes. Angelo was on the Local Organizing and Scientific Committees for the 2001 Statistics conference in Montreal, and also on the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2002 SSC meeting in Hamilton. He served as Ontario representative on the SSC board from 2002 until 2006. Since 2006 he has served on the SSC Executive as Public Relations Officer chairing the Publications and Public Relations Committees. Together with Roman Viveros-Aguilera, Angelo served as interim editor of Liaison between June and November 2007. He is currently leading the negotiations with Wiley-Blackwell for them to publish the Canadian Journal of Statistics. Since 2003, he has also been the president of the Southern Ontario Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA).

Wendy Lou

Wendy Lou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Department Statistics at the University of Toronto. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Statistical Methods for Health Care. Her work focuses on the development of statistical methodology for the study of chronic conditions and quality improvement, as well as on biomedical applications of the distribution theory of runs and patterns. After completing her Ph.D at the University of Toronto, she held a faculty position (Assistant, Associate Professor) in the Department of Biomathematical Sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine of New York University, prior to returning to Toronto. She has served as Member of the Regional Advisory Board for the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society, as Chair of the Local Assistance Committee for the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Toronto, and as Organizer and Chair of various invited sessions at the SSC Annual Meetings and the JSM. She is currently active as President of the Southern Ontario Regional Association (SORA) of the SSC, as SORA Representative to the ASA Council of Chapters, as Ontario Representative on the SSC Board of Directors, and as Program Chair for the 2009 SSC Annual Meeting in Vancouver.

Jeffrey Picka

Jeff Picka has been an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton since 2003. After finishing a B.A.Sc. and M.Sc. at Toronto, he completed his Ph.D. in 1997 with Michael Stein at the University of Chicago, went on to a NISS post-doc at Northwestern University's Centre for Advanced Cement-Based Materials and then to a visiting assistant professorship at University of Maryland (College Park). His main focus of research is into methods for fitting models to disordered spatial data that arise from problems in physics and materials science. He has been a board member since 2006.

Gary Sneddon

Gary Sneddon has been a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Memorial University since 1999, and is presently statistics director. He completed his PhD in statistics at Dalhousie University under the supervision Chris Field, and was a postdoc in the Geophysical Statistics Project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, supervised by Doug Nychka. He is a former organizer of the SSC Job Fair and has been an associate editor of Liaison. When he's not shovelling his St. John's driveway, he pursues research on models for correlated count data.

Anne-Catherine Favre

Anne-Catherine Favre obtained her Ph.D. in statistical hydrology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in 2001. Since June 2002, she has been a professor of statistics at INRS-ETE, Université du Québec. In September 2004, she was named the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Statistical Hydrology. She is interested in modeling and analysis of time series, especially the modeling of short term effects, the identification and effect of sources of uncertainty in meteorological models, and the impact of climate variability on hydrology. From 2006 she has been member of the board of directors of the SSC as regional representative for Québec.

Denis Larocque

Denis Larocque is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Sciences at HEC Montreal. He obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Montreal in 1997. His research interests are multivariate nonparametric methods and nonparametric methods for dependent data. Since 2004, he is a Member of the Editorial Committee of the Canadian Journal of Statistics. He has been Chair (2002-2003) and Member (2001-2002 and 2003-2007) of the Bilingualism Committee of the SSC and is currently the SSC representative in the JSM 2008 Joint Program Committee.

Pascale Rousseau

Pascale Rousseau is a professor in the Mathematics department of the Université du Québec à Montréal where she has taught since obtaining her Ph.D. in 1978 from the Université de Montréal. Her current research interests are mainly in Regression Logistics Trees and applications of the biplot technique as developed by John Gower. She was president of the Statistical Society of Montreal for three terms and is still a member of its board of directors. She has been very active with the North America Classification Society and she served several terms as a member of its board of direction.

David Stephens

David Stephens is currently Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University, Montreal. After completing undergraduate (BSc Mathematics 1986) and graduate (PhD Statistics 1990) at University of Nottingham UK, he moved to Imperial College London as Research Associate in the Department of Mathematics. In 1995 he became Lecturer in Statistics, progressed to Senior Lecturer, before moving to McGill in 2006. His research interests focus Bayesian Theory and Applications and Bayesian Computation, with applications in Bioinformatics and Statistical Genomics and Time Series. More recently, he has begun working on Bayesian biostatistics and causal methods, Bayesian nonparametrics, spatial point patterns, and is interested in applications in ecology, econometrics, medicine.

Patrick Brown

Patrick Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and a Scientist in the Research Unit at Cancer Care Ontario, the province's cancer agency. Prior to this he spent 10 years in the UK, completing his PhD and subsequently working at Lancaster University. His research focuses on the development of models and methodology for geostatistical and spatial point processes, longitudinal random effects models, and multi-state models. These are applied to problems in public health and disease mapping, forest ecology, veterinary epidemiology, and health services research. He is currently an associate editor of Applied Statistics, and was chair of a Royal Statistical Society local group for many years.

Tim Ramsay

Dr. Ramsay, a biostatistician, is an associate scientist with the Ottawa Health Research Institute and an assistant professor in the University of Ottawa’s Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine. Prior to holding these positions he was a principal scientist with the Institute of Population Health, where he held a five-year career award: the McLaughlin/NSERC/SCHRC Junior Chair in Quantitative Risk Assessment. He teaches biostatistics and supervises graduate students at both the Master’s and PhD level, and is co-investigator in a variety of patient-oriented clinical epidemiology research projects.

Changbao Wu

Changbao Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. His major research area is in survey sampling. He served as President of the Survey Method Section of SSC in 2005, and is the leader of the MITACS/NPCDS project on Statistical Methods for Complex Survey Data. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics, Survey Methodology, The Canadian Journal of Statistics and Biometrika.

Ping Yan

Ping Yan obtained Ph.D (1992) in statistics at University of Waterloo. He is a Research Manager at the Centre of Communicable Diseases and Infection Control, Infectious Diseases and Emergency Preparedness Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). He is also an adjunct Associate Professor at Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, and a member of the Ph.D Supervising Committee for a current candidate in that department. His work at PHAC is the management of a team of statisticians and mathematicians that provides statistical consulting and mathematical modelling services to various aspects related to the understanding of the spread of infectious diseases, forecasting, evaluating control strategies and operations research. He also conducts research on methodology developments. Before 2004, he held similar positions in the former Health and Welfare Canada and in Health Canada and the majority of his work was dedicated to statistics models and methods in HIV/AIDS epidemiology, including a period in late 1990's during which he was responsible for the HIV/AIDS Surveillance Program in Canada. He is a member of a number of reference groups at UNAIDS, WHO and CDC (US). He served as the Secretary at the Board of Directors: Statistical Society of

Ottawa during the period 1995-1996; and as a member of the SSC Award Committee for the period 1997-1999. Currently he is SSC’s appointment to Canadian Consortium for Research (until December 31, 2009). Being a federal public servant, he has adequate competence in reading, writing and communicating in both official languages in Canada.

John Brewster

John Brewster is a Professor and Head of the Department of Statistics at the University of Manitoba. He has served the SSC as Secretary, President of the Business and Industrial Statistics Section, Chair of the Publications Committee and as a regional representative on the Board of Directors. John obtained B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of British Columbia and an M.Sc. degree in mathematics from the University of Toronto. His main research interests are in experimental design, foundations of statistics, statistical decision theory and computer experimentation. He has consulted and collaborated with companies and organizations in Manitoba and has given a number of workshops on experimental design in the aerospace, agri-food, mining and semiconductor sectors. John is a former Director of the Statistical Advisory Service, former Director of the Institute of Industrial Mathematical Sciences and a past recipient of the Dr. & Mrs. H.H. Saunderson Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Manitoba.

Raj Srinivasan

Raj Srinivasan is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Saskatchewan. His research and teaching interests include applied probability, queuing and queuing network models of communication systems and bioinformatics. He received his M.Sc. (1983) and Ph.D. (1988) degrees both from Carleton University. A project investigator of the MITACS NCE since its inception, he has served as a steering committee member of an information technology project. He helped organize workshops at the Fields Institute and was one of the principal organizers of the Stochastic Networks Conference and the Call center Workshop (2004) held at CRM. He also served as one of the local organizers of the SSC 2005 Meeting in Saskatoon. Currently, he is the Head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Saskatchewan.

Bertrand Clarke

Bertrand Clarke received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1984, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1989. Currently, he is employed at the University of British Columbia as an Associate Professor. Most of his research is in the mathematical end of statistics, but his main interest is in conceptually novel techniques derived from predictive optimality and model uncertainty. Currently his main focus is on the monograph he has been writing on Data Mining and Machine Learning.

Kevin Keen

Kevin Keen is an Associate Professor in Mathematics at the University of Northern British Columbia. He previously has held teaching and research positions with Case Western Reserve University (1999 – 2003), the University of Manitoba (1994 – 2004), and Royal Roads Military College (1989 – 1994). He served as Vice President (1996 – 1997) and President (1997 – 1998) of the Statistical Association of Manitoba. He served as Statistics sub-committee chair of the British Columbia Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics and Statistics and was the SSC’s representative to this Committee (2005 – 2006). Currently for the SSC, he serves as Chair of the Case Studies Awards Committee. He received the B.Sc. (honors) in Mathematics from Simon Fraser University (1980), an M.Sc. in Meteorology from McGill University (1982), an M.Sc. in Statistics (1984) and the Ph.D. in Statistics (1987) from the University of Toronto. His research interests have been focused in the development of novel methodology in the areas of multivariate statistics and survey sampling theory for the assessment of rater reliability and the study of the quantitative genetics of complex autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. He has been a member of the SSC for over 20 years and a P.Stat. since 2005.

Jim Hanley

James Hanley received his B.Sc. and MSc in Mathematics/Statistics from University College Cork (Ireland) in 1968 and 1969; and his Ph.D. in Statistics/Biometry from the University of Waterloo in 1973. His first positions were as a clinical trials statistician with two North American co-operative oncology groups, at SUNY/Buffalo, and the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute and the HSPH department of Biostatistics in Boston. He joined McGill's department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in 1980. He spent a year at the WHO cancer unit in Geneva, and another as a teacher in the McGill-Ethiopia program in Addis Ababa. He collaborates widely, and has developed biostatistical methods for the evaluation of the performance of medical diagnostic tests. He has served on several Editorial Boards, and is currently an Associate Editor for Biometrics. He chaired the local organizing committee for the International Biometrics Conference held in Montreal in 2006. He has published several expository articles and is developing an appetite for the history of statistics. He is keen to recruit others to the statistics profession. For more information, visit http://www.epi.mcgill.ca/hanley.

Patrick Turgeon

Patrick Turgeon has over twelve years of analytics experience in both profit and non-profit environment. Beginning his career working with the Ministry of Corrections, and The Philadelphia Health Corporation, he conducted a large number of needs assessment from design, implementation and through evaluation. In turn, these studies were used to secure funding for the various programs for each organization. Thereafter, working with an international marketing research firm (Psyma) he conducted, designed, implemented, and evaluated multi-lingual survey questionnaire for large pharmaceutical companies such as: Wyeth-Ayerst, HMR, Pharmacia-Upjohn and Bayer. In the past nine years, he worked as a Database Marketing Analyst with a number of large known brands (e.g. Dean & Deluca, Brookstone, Scholastics, Expedia, The Shopping Channel and Covenant House Toronto). Much of his work was involved in strategy and execution of direct marketing program for the purpose of customer acquisition and retention. In May 2006, Patrick founded Figurs* and became an independent contractor. Since then his clients have been Carlson Marketing, (with account such as BMO, TD, Scotia, Via Rail, and VanCity amongst others), Aids Committee of Toronto, and Indigo Books and Music amongst others. Patrick Turgeon holds a Diploma of Social Sciences (Vanier College), a Bachelor of Sociology (University of Ottawa), and a Master in Social Work (University of Toronto). He also completed some post-graduates business and database and statistics courses from Penn State and Ryerson University. He’s also a member of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC), The International Institute of Forecasters (IIF), Toronto SQL Server User Group, (TSQL), and Toronto Area SAS Society.

Thierry Duchesne

Thierry Duchesne, P.Stat, has been an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Laval University since January 2003 where he also holds an adjunct researcher position in the Research Unit on Population Health. Before joining Laval, he finished his Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Waterloo in 1999 and was assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Toronto from 1999 to 2002. His research interests are mainly centered around event time and longitudinal data analysis, with applications to epidemiology, ecology, engineering and actuarial science. He has been actively involved in SSC business since 2002 through various positions, namely BISS treasurer, SSC board member and chair of the local organizing committee for the 2010 annual meeting.

Steven Thompson

Steve Thompson is Shrum Chair in Science at Simon Fraser University, where he is a professor in the department of Statistics and Actuarial Science. He is the author of the book Sampling and coauthor of Adaptive Sampling. Representative publications include "Adaptive cluster sampling" (JASA 1990), "Targeted random walk sampling designs" (Survey Methodology 2006), and "Adaptive web sampling (Biometrics 2006). His Ph.D. is from Oregon State University. Previously he served on the faculties of Pennsylvania State University, The University of Auckland, and the University of Alaska. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has served on various panels for the National Academies of Science, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and other bodies. His research has included sampling theory, adaptive designs, and methods for ecological surveys and for human health studies. A current focus concerns network based sampling methods for studies of hidden populations such as people at high risk for HIV/AIDS.

Lenka Mach

Lenka Mach is a Senior Methodologist, Consultant and Researcher in the Data Analysis Resource Centre of Statistics Canada. Her first university degree is from the Prague School of Economics, followed by Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in statistics from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Since 1987 Lenka has worked at Statistics Canada, most of the time in the Business Survey Methods Division as a methodologist for many different surveys and statistical programs. Her current research interests are in the analysis of complex survey data and sample coordination. She has been the Treasurer of the SSC Survey Methods Section since July 2006.

Murray Burke

Murray Burke, BSc (Concordia), MA (York), PhD (Carleton University) joined the University of Calgary in 1977 and has been full professor since 1989. He was a member of the Programme Committee of the SSC’s Probability Section for the past two year. He was Chair of the Division of Statistics and Actuarial Science (two terms). Murray is a former member of NSERC’s Postgraduate Scholarship Committee. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. Research interests include probability theory including empirical processes with applications to statistical areas such as goodness-of-fit, survival analysis, nonparametric estimation and tests.

Raluca Balan

Raluca Balan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Ottawa. She has completed her B.Sc. (1996) and M.Sc. (1997) at the University of Bucharest (Romania), and her Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa (2001). She was a post-doctoral fellow at Université de Sherbrooke (2001-2003), and a recipient of an NSERC University Faculty Award at University of Ottawa (2003-2008). She served on the NSERC Scholarships and Fellowships Committee. She is interested in probability theory.