Scientific Program - Biographies

Dr. Allan Donner is Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Western Ontario and Head of Biometry at Robarts Clinical Trials, Robarts Research Institute, both located in London,Ontario. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg,Manitoba and obtained his doctorate degree in Statistics from Harvard University.

Dr. Donner's methodological research includes contributions to the design and analysis of clinical trials, with related publications over the last ten years appearing in Clinical Trials,Biometrics, Statistics in Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, Pharmaceutical Statistics and several other journals. He has a special interest in community intervention trials, and is co-author (with Dr. Neil Klar) of the text Design and Analysis of Cluster Randomization Trials in Health Research (Arnold Publishing Company, 2000).This interest has led to his involvement as a co-investigator on several funded studies in perinatal epidemiology sponsored by the World Health Organization. He is also a consultant with the International Vaccine Institute on trials randomizing entire communities to vaccines designed to prevent typhoid and other infectious diseases in developing countries.

Dr. Donner has presented invited talks for the Society for Clinical Trials, the Biometric Society,the Drug Information Association, the International Clinical Epidemiology Network,the the American College of Epidemiology, the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and the Society for Epidemiologic Research. Other activities include membership on several data monitoring committees for clinical trials sponsored by government and industry. Most recently he has served as Chair of the Data Monitoring and Ethics Committee for an internationally funded community intervention trial evaluating the effect of Vitamin A supplementation on maternal mortality in Ghana.

Dr. Donner is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Bioavailability and Bioequivalence at Health Canada and serves on the Advisory Board of the online journal Trials. He served as Statistical Editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology from 1991-1999 and is a past president of the Biostatistics Section of the Statistical Society of Canada.

Nicholas Horton received his doctorate in Biostatistics, with minors in Psychosocial Comorbidity and Theoretical Statistics from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1999. He is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. His research interests are in longitudinal regression models and missing data methods, with applications in psychiatric epidemiology and substance abuse research. Nick has also been active in a project to develop methods to combine information from multiple source or informant reports. Recently he and his students at Smith have been undertaking a review of statistical methods used in the medical literature, and the implications of this increasing sophistication on statistical and medical education. He was formerly the statistician for the Black Women's Health Project. Nick's group at Smith is also the home of statistics haiku project.

He collaborates with researchers at Harvard University, Boston Medical Center, University of Washington, Thomas Jefferson University, Yale and with projects in Tanzania and Russia, and regularly serves on NIH review committees. He has co-authored more than 80 papers in the statistical methodology, clinical research, health services and statistical education research literature.

Kerrie Mengersen currently holds a Research Chair in Statistics, and is Director of the Science Research Centre at QUT and Program Director for Bayesian Learning in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Complex Dynamic Systems and Control. She is an Accredited Member of the Statistical Society of Australia (2001), an elected Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (2004), an elected Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences (2005), and a long-term member of the International Biometrics Society and International Society for Bayesian Analysis. She is currently Editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics.

Kerrie’s research interests are in applied statistics, with particular focus on Bayesian statistics and related computation. Specific methodological interests are in Bayesian statistics, mixture models, hierarchical modelling and meta-analysis. Her applied interests are in biometrics, biostatistics, environmetrics, genetic statistics and control. Through her applied focus, Kerrie has the privilege of working with many people doing amazing things in a variety of research fields. She maintains an active commercial consulting relationship with various government and industry groups and has presented a variety of short courses on general and specialized statistics topics across Australia. 'Bayes for Beginners' is one of them.

Associate Professor Russell Millar is a likelihoodist who doesn't mind throwing a prior into the mix. He pioneered the fitting of Bayesian nonlinear state-space models to time series of abundance data, and more recently has published on the sensitivity of Bayesian inference to prior and likelihood. Current Bayesian research is looking at the pros and cons of hierarchical models for over-dispersed and zero-inflated count data.

Ross's research interests include statistical process control, applied multivariate analysis and applied statistical modelling. In the area of statistical process control he has published 20 refereed papers in international journals and the proceedings of international conferences. In the area of applied multivariate analysis and applied statistical modelling, Ross has published 16 papers in refereed journals.

Ross has been working at CSIRO for just over 16 years. Prior to joining CSIRO Ross lectured at University of Natal, University of Cape Town and University of Wollongong. During his time at CSIRO, he has acted as a consultant for more than 25 national and international companies operating in Australia. In the Health area, Ross has worked on research contracts for the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, New South Wales Department of Health, and Australian Health and Welfare.

Ari is a graduate of the Department of Statistics, The University of Melbourne, where he obtained a Master of Science in 1977. He was a tutor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Adelaide for 4 years and moved to the South Australia Institute of Technology as a lecturer for 4 years and had a short time as a lecturer in his old Department at the University of Melbourne. During these years he worked on his PhD under the supervision of Bill Venables (now in CSIRO) and graduated in 1987. He returned to the University of Adelaide as a lecturer in the Department of Statistics, was promoted and spent a total of 10 enjoyable years in the Department. In 1997 he was seconded to the Waite Campus of the University of Adelaide to set up a new group, BiometricsSA, a joint University of Adelaide and State Government (South Australian Research and Development Institute) consulting group. The group grew from 4 staff to 16 staff, 10 PhD students and many research grants. Unfortunately the group was disbanded in 2006. Ari is now a Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine at the University of Adelaide, and is externally funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation and Mathematical and Information Sciences, CSIRO.

Throughout all the changes, Ari continues to be interested in statistical modeling, and most recently in statistical genetics as it applies to plant and animal breeding.

Robert L. Wolpert is Professor of Statistical Science and Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA. He earned his Bachelor's degree at Cornell University, studying probability and statistics with Kiefer, Wolfowitz, Spitzer, and Ito and his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University, building stochastic process and random field models to solve problems in constructive quantum field theory. He has made contributions to the foundations of statistics (studying and extending the Likelihood Principle), to statistical methodology (developing point-process and random-field-based approaches to nonparametric Bayesian analysis, particularly for spatially-indexed data), and in a range of applications in environmental science, epidemiology, and other fields. His current interests include spatial stochastic risk analysis, spatial extremes, and emerging modeling and inference problems in neurophysiology and in high-energy physics.

James V Zidek is Professor Emeritus and Founding Head of Statistics at the University of British Columbia. He obtained his PhD at Stanford University. His interests include statistical decision analysis and environmental statistics, having made both theoretical and applied contributions to the latter. Service includes being President of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC). Honors include the SSC's Gold Medal and Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada. Among other current appointments he serves on the the EPA's CASAC Ozone Review Panel.

Last updated 9 December 2007.