Keynote Speaker Profiles

Abdel El-Shaarawi
	Abdel El-Shaarawi was born on December 31, 1942, in Zagazig, Egypt. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in 1964 and 1968 from Cairo University and his Ph.D. in Statistics in 1973 from University of Waterloo. In 1973 he began a career as a research scientist at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Ontario. He has been part-time Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, since 1980, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences,
University of Western Ontario, 1986 to 1996, and in the Department of Statistics, University of British Columbia, since 2001. During 1983--1984 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Metz and during 2002--2003 at the University of Genoa. For shorter periods he has been Visiting Professor at the University of Kuwait (1998, 1999), Masaryk University (1998, 1999) and King Saud University (2000). He is founding Editor of the journal Environmetrics and founding President of The International Environmetrics Society. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (United Kingdom), the American Statistical Association and the Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand. Awards include the Distinguished Achievement Medal of the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment and the Citation of Excellence Award from the Government of Canada.
Fiona A Steele
	Dr Fiona Steele has undertaken extensive work in the modelling of longitudinal data and has taught a number of short courses in multilevel modelling and event history analysis in the UK and overseas. Research interests Statistical methodology • Multilevel modelling • Event history analysis • Simultaneous and structural equation modelling
Fiona Steele has been a Reader in Social Statistics in the Centre for Multilevel Modelling at the University of Bristol since 2005. She has previously held lectureships in statistics at the London School of Economics and the Institute of Education, University of London. Fiona’s interests are in methodological research motivated by social science problems, particularly in demography. Her areas of expertise include multilevel modelling, event history analysis, and structural equation modelling. She has recently been awarded the RSS Guy Medal in Bronze 2008 for “her methodological and practical contributions to multilevel modelling, to demography and to social statistics more generally”. She is actively involved in the Royal Statistical Society (http://www.rss.org.uk) as a member of Council, of the Social Statistics Section, and as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Royal Statistical Society, Series A: Statistics in Society.
Alastair Young
	Prior to taking up a Chair in Statistics at Imperial in 2005, Alastair Young was Reader in Methodological Statistics at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He has particular research interest in contemporary, computer-intensive, approaches to frequentist statistics, with particular focus on bootstrap and related approaches to parametric and non-parametric inference. He also is very active in the development of approximation methods, such as saddlepoint procedures, in statistics, and in development of inference procedures for spatial data. Alastair is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and former Joint Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B.
Research Interests : I work on contemporary, computer-intensive, statistical methodology, with particular interests in the bootstrap and other resampling methods, parametric likelihood-based inference, approximation methods, spatial statistics and predictive inference. According to legend, Baron Munchausen saved himself from drowning in quicksand by pulling himself up using only his bootstraps. The statistical bootstrap, which uses resampling from a given set of data to mimic the variability that produced the data in the first place, has a rather more dependable theoretical basis, and can be a highly effective procedure for estimation of error quantities in statistical problems. But when does it work? When is it needed? What are its properties? How can it be applied to complex data structures? Can we usefully and reliably bootstrap the bootstrap itself to provide accurate inference when confronted with small data samples?
Simon Thompson
	Simon Thompson has been Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit, the pre-eminent research centre for biostatistics in the U.K., since 2000, and is an honourary professor of biostatistics at the University of Cambridge. He held previous academic appointments at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and was the first professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Imperial College London. His research interests are in meta-analysis and evidence synthesis, especially issues of heterogeneity and bias and use of individual participant data; clinical trial methodology, especially Bayesian approaches to the design and analysis of cluster randomised trials; and health economic evaluation, including cost-effectiveness analysis and long-term health economic modelling. He has published widely in these areas. He has collaborated on a number of major clinical trials, recently including all the major U.K. national trials of screening and treatment for abdominal aortic aneurysms.
Elizabeth Thompson
	Elizabeth Thompson is Professor of Statistics and Adjunct Professor of Biostatistics and of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received a B.A. in Mathematics (1970), a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics (1971), and Ph.D. in Statistics (1974), from Cambridge University, UK. In 1988, she was awarded an Sc.D. degree by the University of Cambridge. From 1975-81 she was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and from 1981-5 was Fellow and Director of Studies in Mathematics at Newnham College. From 1976-1985 she was a University Lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in December 1985, and was Chair of the Department from 1989 to 1994.
Thompson has published four research monographs and over 115 refereed papers in the scientific statistical literature. Her research focuses on the development of models and of likelihood-based methods for inference from genetic and genomic data, particularly data observed on related individuals whether in structured populations or as members of large and complex pedigree structures. She was elected a member of of the International Statistical Institute (1981), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998). She received the inaugural Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute for Statistical Sciences, and the Weldon Prize for contribitions to Biometric Science from the University of Oxford (2001). She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002-3), and a Rothschild Visiting Professorship at the University of Cambridge (2006). In 2008, she was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Twenty-three students have obtained Ph.D.'s working under Thompson's supervision. Of these, sixteen now hold university faculty positions, and four hold research positions in industry or the nonprofit sector.     Miguel Hernán Miguel Hernán is Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Associate Director of the Program on Causal Inference in Epidemiology and Allied Sciences at the Harvard University School of Public Health. His methodological research is focused on causal inference from longitudinal data, in which statistical methods are applied to observational studies to simulate hypothetical randomised experiments, under strict assumptions. Current areas of application of this methodology include optimal use of antiretroviral therapy in persons infected with HIV, and assessment of lifestyle and pharmacological causes of cardiovascular disease. His substantive research is focused on the aetiology of diseases of the central nervous system, such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Melbourne Monday 30 June - Thursday 3 July 2008