OZCOTS 2012 - Keynote Speakers

Keynote speakers are:
Thursday, 12th July: Professor Jessica Utts, University of California, Irvine.
Friday, 13th July: Professor Kaye Basford, University of Queensland.

 

Professor Jessica Utts

Jessica Utts is a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Irvine, transferring there in September 2008 after many years at the University of California, Davis. Her interests include statistics education and applications of statistics to a variety of areas, most notably parapsychology, medicine, and transportation. In 1995, with Professor Ray Hyman (University of Oregon), she prepared a U.S. Government sponsored report assessing the statistical evidence for psychic functioning in research which received wide-spread media coverage. She is an advocate for the promotion of statistical literacy, the recipient of two distinguished teaching awards and the author of three statistics textbooks with an emphasis on statistical literacy, including “Seeing Through Statistics” and with Robert Heckard “Mind On Statistics”. Jessica has served as Chair or President of The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS), the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society (WNAR), The Caucus for Women in Statistics, the Board of the Consortium for the Advancement of Statistics Education (CAUSE), the Section on Statistical Education of the American Statistical Association and the Development Committee for Advanced Placement Statistics. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Association for Psychological Science. She has appeared on numerous television shows, including Larry King Live, CNN Morning News and ABC Nightline, discussing her research in parapsychology.

 

Professor Kaye Basford

 

Kaye Basford is a Professor in Biometry at the University of Queensland, where she is currently also President of the Academic Board, and was Head of the School of Land, Crop and Food Sciences 2001-2011. Kaye is currently President of the International Biometric Society, and is a past president of the Statistical Society of Australia Inc, and the Queensland Zone of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology. Her academic focus has been on the analysis and interpretation of data from large-scale multi-environment plant breeding experiments, such as those conducted by the international agricultural research centers. Her first book, McLachlan and Basford (1988), presented the theory and application of the mixture method of clustering, while her second, Basford and Tukey (1999), detailed various graphical approaches to analyzing multiresponse data. Kaye has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature (13 book chapters and 103 journal articles), produced 5 statistical packages, 11 commissioned reports and 22 technical reports, and has supervised or co-supervised 20 PhD and 3 MPhil graduates. Kaye has attracted competitive research funds from government and industry bodies, including the high-profile Australian Centre for Plant functional Genomics (ACPFG), a joint $41M initiative based in Adelaide, but with nodes in Melbourne and Brisbane. In 1998 Kaye was awarded the highest possible accolade from the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology – the Australian Medal for Agriculture, and in 2006, she was awarded a Fellowship with the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering for having developed statistical methods that are used world-wide to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of crop breeding programs.