Keynote and Invited Speakers
Dr Nick Fisher is the founder of ValueMetrics Australia, an organisation that carries out research and consulting primarily in the area of Performance Measurement. After 30 years as a statistical consultant and researcher in CSIRO, he left his position as a Chief Research Scientist in May 2001. Whilst in CSIRO, he led the development of CSIRO's Organisational Performance Measurement (OPM®) system, which has been applied successfully in a number of private and public enterprises, and has been part of graduate programs at a number of institutions.
Nick carries out research and consulting in Performance Measurement, with particular focus on improving quantitative reports to Boards and top management, and the associated business improvement processes.
He holds honorary appointments as Visiting Professor of Statistics at the University of Sydney, and Visiting Professor of Quality Management at Macquarie University. He is also professionally accredited by the Statistical Society of Australia.
Dr Robert Gentleman is a Senior Director of Genentech specializing in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Prior to his move to Genentech in 2009 Robert has held a variety of full and adjunct academic appointments including the University of Washington, the University of Ghent, Harvard University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Waterloo.
Robert is extremely well known for his foundational work on the R project (www.r-project.org), being one of the two original authors along with Ross Ihaka, as well as his work with the associated Bioconductor project (http://www.bioconductor.org) which provides a large set of public domain tools for bioinformatics academics and professionals.
His current fields of interest relate to the use of high throughput sequencing to advance our knowledge of many basic biological mechanisms. Of particular interest is developing methods for understanding transcriptional regulation through the use of careful experimentation and ChIP-seq data. His group is also interested in helping to develop a better understanding of the role that transposable elements play in human disease.
Dr Trevor Hastie joined Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. as Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics in 1994. Trevor is famous worldwide for his work in data mining and machine learning. His main research contributions have been in the field of applied nonparametric regression and classification, and he has written two books in this area: "Generalized Additive Models" (with R. Tibshirani, Chapman and Hall, 1991), and "Elements of Statistical Learning" (with R. Tibshirani and J. Friedman, Springer 2001). He has also made contributions in statistical computing, co-editing (with J. Chambers) a large software library on modelling tools in the S language ("Statistical Models in S", Wadsworth, 1992), which form the basis for much of the statistical modelling in R and S-plus. His current research focuses on applied problems in biology and genomics, medicine and industry, in particular data mining, prediction and classification problems.
Dr Xihong Lin is a Professor of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. She also currently serves as the coordinating director of the Program of Quantitative Genomics (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/pqg).
Dr Lin's major statistical research interests lie in developing statistical methods for high-dimensional and correlated data. Examples of high-dimensional data include genomic and proteomic data in basic, population and clinical sciences. Examples of correlated data include longitudinal data, clustered data, hierarchical data and spatial data. She is particularly interested in developing statistical and computational methods for "omics" data in population-based studies, such as genetic epidemiology, genetic environmental sciences and clinical studies.
Dr Lin's specific areas of statistical research include statistical learning methods for high-dimensional data, dimension reduction, variable selection, nonparametric and semiparametric regression models, measurement error, mixed (frailty) models, estimating equations, missing data.
Dr Lin's areas of applications include cancer, genetic epidemiology, gene and environment, genome-wide association studies, genomics in population science, biomarkers and proteomics.
Dr Alan Welsh is the EJ Hannan Professor of Statistics and the head of the Centre for Mathematics and its Applications at the Australian National University. His current interests include statistical inference, modelling, robustness, nonparametric methods, adaptive estimation, and the analysis of survey data.
Alan obtained a BSc from the University of Sydney in 1982 and a PhD from the ANU in 1985. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago from 1984 to 1987 before he became a lecturer at the ANU. He held the Chair of Statistics at the University of Southampton in the UK from 2001 to 2003 before returning to the ANU as EJ Hannan Professor of Statistics. He was awarded the Moran Medal in 1990 and is a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association.
A programme is available: Conference Booklet.