Invited Speakers

Melanie Bahlo

Dr Melanie Bahlo is a laboratory head in the Bioinformatics Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne. She graduated in 1998 with a PhD in population genetics from Monash University. She currently holds an ARC Future Fellowship and an honorary NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship. In 2009 she was awarded the Moran medal from the Australian Academy of Science. Her research areas are statistical genetics, bioinformatics and population genetics. Her statistical analyses have led to the discovery of new genes in involved in genetic diseases such as deafness and epilepsy. She has also developed new methods and software for the analysis of genetic data.

Alan Gelfand

Alan E. Gelfand is The James B Duke Professor of Statistical Science.  He is currently chair of the  Department of Statistical Science (DSS) and enjoys a secondary appointment as Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in the Nicholas School. Author of more than 200 papers (more than 140 since 1990) Gelfand is internationally known for his contributions to applied statistics, Bayesian computation and Bayesian inference.  (An article in Science Watch found him to be the tenth most cited mathematical scientist in the world over the period 1991-2001).  Gelfand is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.  He is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.  He is a former President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.  In 2006, he received the Parzen Prize for a lifetime of research contribution to Statistics, in 2011 he was chosen to give the Craig Lectures and in January 2012 he will give the Mahalanobis Lectures in Calcutta, New Delhi, and Bangalore.

Rob Hyndman

Rob J Hyndman is Professor of Statistics and Director of the Business & Economic Forecasting Unit at Monash University. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Forecasting and a Director of the International Institute of Forecasters. Rob is the author of over 100 research papers in statistical science. In 2007, he received the Moran medal from the Australian Academy of Science for his contributions to statistical research, especially in the area of statistical forecasting. For 25 years, Rob has maintained an active consulting practice, assisting hundreds of companies and organizations. His recent consulting work has involved forecasting electricity demand, tourism demand, the Australian government health budget and case volume at a US call centre.

Yoni Nazarathy

Dr. Yoni Nazarathy's research is in the field of applied probability, queueing networks and their control. He obtained his PhD from the University of Haifa, Israel in 2009. He then spent two years as a post-doctoral research in the Netherlands, at the European Institute for Statistics, Probability, Stochastic Operations Research and their Applications (EURANDOM) and at CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) Amsterdam. He then spent an additional year as a Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. As of April 2012, he is a Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland.

Christian P. Robert

Christian P. Robert is Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University Paris-Dauphine since 2000. He is also a 2010-2015 senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and the former Head of the Statistics Laboratory of the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST). He was previously Professor at the University de Rouen from 1992 till 2000 and has held visiting positions in Purdue University, Cornell University, and the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New-Zealand.  He has been an adjunct professor at Ecole Polytechnique for 13 years and is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), as well as a Medallion Lecturer of the IMS. He was Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B from 2006 till 2009 and has been an associate editor of the Annals of Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Society, Statistical Science, Sankhya. He is currently an Area Editor for the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) journal. He was the 2008 President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). His research areas cover Bayesian statistics, with a focus on decision theory and model selection, numerical probability, with works cantering on the application of Markov chain theory to simulation, and computational statistics, developing and evaluating new methodologies for the analysis of statistical models.

Scott Sisson

Scott A. Sisson is Associate Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He is also an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow (2010-2014). He previously studied at the Universities of Lancaster and Bristol (UK), and has worked at UNSW since 2003. He is currently President of the Australasian chapter of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA), and Chair of the Bayesian Statistics section of the Statistical Society of Australia (SSAI). He serves on the Research Section Committee of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), and will be President of the New South Wales Branch Council of the SSAI in 2012-3. In 2011 he was jointly awarded the Moran Medal by the Australian Academy of Science for outstanding early career research in statistics. Sisson's research focuses on developing effective methods of statistical inference in computationally challenging modelling scenarios, which are driven by the practical needs of scientific research. In particular, this research includes Bayesian inference, computational statistics and extreme value modelling, in addition to a wide range of applied scientific research.

Terry Speed

Terry Speed received a BSc at the University of Melbourne majoring in mathematics and statistics, and PhD in mathematics at Monash University. He has held appointments at universities and at the CSIRO, and he is currently head of bioinformatics at WEHI. His research interests now focus on cancer genomics.

Christopher K. Wikle

Dr. Wikle is Professor of Statistics and Adjunct Professor of Meteorology at the University of Missouri.  His research interests are in the statistical modeling of spatio-temporal data and dynamical processes.  This has led to the development of methodology in complex, non-linear systems, such as atmospheric winds, ocean dynamics, ecosystem dynamics, and the coupling and interaction of processes across spatial and temporal scales.  A substantial component of his research methodology has been concerned with the use of scientific information to motivate parameterizations in hierarchical statistical models. He is the author of over 100 refereed articles and the recent book, Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data, co-authored with Noel Cressie.

Dr. Wikle is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award, Iowa State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences from the University of Missouri, and the

Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics and the Environment.