The Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS) is an international, professional statistical society for the education, employment and advancement of women in statistics. Our mission is to advance the careers of women statisticians through advocacy, providing resources and learning opportunities, increasing their professional participation and visibility, and promoting and assessing research that impacts women statisticians. This CWS session intends to showcase women and their contributions to the field of statistics and its applications. It is a session that comprises women from all over the world and who work in diverse areas of statistical applications. The session offers latest topics in statistical research and applications that are likely to have broad appeal to the audience such as machine learning in genomics, tools for experimental designs, infectious disease modeling, and Bayesian survival analysis in neonatal epidemiology.

The speakers, tentative talk titles and short bios follow below. Vanda Inácio from the School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh will be chairing this session.

We are looking forward to be part of the ISI 2023 program,

Best regards,

Vanda Lourenço

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STATISTICAL RESEARCH BY WOMEN FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD

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Asia: Fengqing Chao (Kaust; fengqing.chao@kaust.edu.sa)

Title: Estimating and projecting the disparities in pre- and post-natal survival using Bayesian methods

Short-Bio: Dr. Chao is a currently a Research Scientist in the Biostatistics Research Group at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Dr. Chao received her Ph.D. in 2017 from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore. Her Ph.D. dissertation is “Bayesian Methods for Estimating Global Health Indicators”. She has been actively collaborating with United Nations Population Division and UNICEF since 2012. She develops complex statistical models for sparse and noisy data for population indicators (e.g. sex ratio at birth, under-5 child mortality rate) across countries over time. She has several publications in PNAS, Lancet Global Health, and Annals of Applied Statistics.

Australia: Emi Tanaka (Monash University; emi.tanaka@monash.edu)

Title: edibble R-package: A cognitive, computational framework for constructing experimental designs

Short-Bio: Dr. Emi Tanaka is a senior lecturer (equivalent to associate professor in the USA system) in statistics at Monash University whose primary interest is to develop impactful statistical methods and tools that can readily be used by practitioners. Her research area includes data visualisation, mixed models and experimental designs, motivated primarily by problems in bioinformatics and agricultural sciences. She is currently the President of the Statistical Society of Australia Victorian Branch and the recipient of the Distinguished Presenter's Award from the Statistical Society of Australia for her delivery of a wide-range of R workshops.

Europe: Vanda Lourenço (NOVA University of Lisbon; vmml@fct.unl.pt)

Title: On the robustness of machine learning methods for genomic prediction

Short-Bio: Vanda Lourenço is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the NOVA School of Science and Technology of the NOVA University of Lisbon. Her main research interests are robust, non-parametric and computational statistics with an emphasis on genetic/genomic association studies and prediction of quantitative traits. She has been mostly working with problems coming from plant breeding but is also interested in the application of the aforementioned statistical tools to both animal and human studies. She is affiliated with several statistical societies, in particular the Portuguese Statistical Society (SPE), where she is at present the President of the Supervisory Board, and the Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS), where she is currently the ‘Portuguese Country Representative for CWS’ and a member of the CWS Nominations Committee.

North-America: Alexandra Schmidt (McGill University; alexandra.schmidt@mcgill.ca)

Title: Recent developments on the modelling of vector-borne diseases

Short-Bio: Alexandra M. Schmidt is Professor of Biostatistics and holds the endowed University Chair in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health (EBOH) at McGill University. Currently, she is the Program Director of the Biostatistics Graduate Program. She is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2020) and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (2010). She was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Medal (2017) from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and the Environment and the Abdel El-Shaarawi Young Investigator Award (2008), from The International Environmetrics Society. She was the 2015 President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.

Chair: Wendy Lou (Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto)

Short-Bio: Vanda Inacio is a Lecturer in Statistics at the School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh since 2016. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at PUC Chile (2012–2016). Vanda received a PhD in Statistics from Universidade de Lisboa and a BSc in Applied Mathematics from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her main research interests are Bayesian (nonparametric) statistics, computational statistics, and biostatistics, with an emphasis on the statistical evaluation of medical tests. Vanda’s work has been published in some of the top-tier journals in the field, like Annals of Applied Statistics, Bayesian Analysis, Biostatistics, Biometrics, Statistics in Medicine, and Statistical Science. Vanda is also a co-author of the R package ROCnReg, the only package integrating both frequentist and Bayesian methods for estimation of ROC curves (with and without covariates). 

This CWS session intends to showcase women from all over the world (Asia, Australia, Europe and North America) and their contributions to the field of statistics and its applications.  It is a session that comprises women from all over the world and who work in diverse areas of statistical applications.  The session offers latest topics in statistical research and applications that are likely to have broad appeal to the audience such as machine learning in genomics, tools for experimental designs, infectious disease modeling, and Bayesian survival analysis in neonatal epidemiology.

Organiser: Dr Vanda Marisa da Rosa Milheiro Lourenco 

Chair: Wendy Lou

Speaker: Emi Tanaka 

Speaker: Prof. Alexandra Schmidt 

Speaker: Dr Vanda Marisa da Rosa Milheiro Lourenco  

Speaker: Dr Fengqing Chao