Ada Lovelace Day
October 14 is Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths.
New Zealand has (only) three female Professors of Statistics, the top position in our UK-style academic ranking. They work in very different areas of statistics, but with related applications to ecological and environmental monitoring, an area of particular interest in New Zealand.
Going north to south:
- Marti Anderson is at Massey University in Albany (and was previously at the University of Auckland). Her research is in multivariate analysis — techniques for analysing ecological data on multiple species together, rather than one at a time — mostly applied to marine species
- Shirley Pledger retired this year from Victoria University. Her research is on capture-recapture methods for counting animals. It’s often impossible to get a complete census of a species even in a limited area, but you can mark the individuals you catch, release them, and observe how often you catch them again. The simplest approaches to estimation are easy but unrealistic; she has worked on more sophisticated and sensible models.
- Jennifer Brown is head of the Maths & Stats department at the University of Canterbury. Her main statistical research is on sampling techniques for monitoring sparse or patchy populations: either rare animals and plants, or invasive weeds. Sampling systematically or purely at random are both very wasteful; ‘adaptive’ sampling designs allow you to take advantage of finding a clump of your target species without biasing the overall results.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »