Scientific Program

The final conference program book is available here (Note: 7MB in size).

Conference theme

Confidence and risk seem to be elements of biometrics and its applications that we often hear in our discussions with clients and colleagues. Biometricians regularly quantify their confidence in a particular result or risks associated with a particular decision, and moreover, these undertakings are imperative for delivering quality research and work to our clients. In addition, with the world shifting gears in relation to dealing with global issues such as terrorism, epidemics and (personal and national) security, the Scientific Program Committee decided an appropriate theme for our conference would be

Biometrics safeguarding our future:
our health and our air, land and water.

Invited speakers

At this year's conference, we are fortunate to have several eminent statisticians in attendance to present new research on biometrical topics. The invited speakers, listed with brief introduction and links to their abstracts, short biographies and websites, are:

Professor Allan Donner is a member of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Robarts Clinical Trials organisation at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Dr Donner's major interest is in biostatistical research as applied to problems which arise in epidemiology, health care research, and clinical trials. He has a special interest in cluster randomisation trials.
Abstract; Biography

Dr Nicholas Horton is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. His research interests are in longitudinal regression models and missing data methods, with applications in psychiatric epidemiology and substance abuse research.
Abstract; Biography

Professor 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. 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.
Abstract; Biography

Associate Professor Russell Millar is a member of the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, NZ. Russell 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. Russell's expertise is in the development and application of statistical methodology for the modelling of real data, specializing in challenging problems such as those encountered in ecology and fisheries research.
Abstract; Biography

Dr Ross Sparks is the leader of the Health Informatics research group in CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, Sydney. Ross's interests are in health surveillance and monitoring, empirical (statistical) modeling, statistical methods for preserving privacy of individuals in unit record data, multivariate analyses and visualization of multivariate data.
Abstract; Biography

Professor Ari Verbyla is 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 CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences. Ari's research interests include statistics applied to agriculture and biological sciences; bioinformatics; statistical modelling, particularly mixed models and their extensions; spatial and temporal modeling; and analysis of quantitative trait loci (QTL).
Abstract; Biography

Robert L. Wolpert is Professor of Statistical Science and Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA. His current interests include spatial stochastic risk analysis, spatial extremes, and emerging modeling and inference problems in neurophysiology and in high-energy physics.
Abstract; Biography

Professor Jim Zidek is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research interests are varied and include bayesian decision making and inference, monitoring network design and spatial prediction, movitated by problems in the environmental and health sciences. At our conference Jim plans on presenting some research on combining statistical (probabilistic) and deterministic (physical, mathematical or process) models.
Abstract; Biography

Last updated 9 Dec 2007.