{"id":35,"date":"2018-06-11T22:16:22","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T22:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aasc.blogs.auckland.ac.nz\/?page_id=35"},"modified":"2018-11-17T22:30:38","modified_gmt":"2018-11-17T22:30:38","slug":"speakers","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.aasc.nz\/speakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Speakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section” _builder_version=”3.0.47″][et_pb_row admin_label=”row” _builder_version=”3.0.47″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.17.2″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”]<\/p>\n

Chris Auld<\/h3>\n

Microsoft<\/p>\n

Hi, I\u2019m Chris and I\u2019m a Principal Software Engineering manager for Microsoft living in Singapore. My team of engineers is located across Asia and Europe and we work with Microsoft\u2019s largest global customers to build advanced analytics and machine learning solutions. I studied Information Science and Law at the University of Otago back when R was S and Margaret Wilson was the Attorney General. Rotorua is my home town and I\u2019m on the board of our tourism organization so ask me to point you in the direction of all the awesome activities. Finally, I\u2019m not much into the 3rd person to be honest\u2026<\/p>\n

Peter Baker<\/h3>\n

School of Public Health, The University of Queensland<\/p>\n

Peter has worked as a statistical consultant and researcher in areas such as agricultural research, Bayesian methods for genetics, health, medical and epidemiological studies for thirty years. He is a Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics at the School of Public Health, UQ where he also acts as a senior statistical collaborator and adviser to several research projects in the Faculty of Medicine.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Borgognone<\/h3>\n

Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries<\/p>\n

Gabriela Borgognone has worked as statistical consultant at the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Australia, for the last 13 years. Throughout this time, she worked as part of state and national plant breeding programs. For the last two and a half years, she has mainly been working with the food science group of the Department. Before coming to Australia, she worked in Argentina for 10 years, both lecturing at university and as statistical consultant at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology.<\/p>\n

Ruth Butler<\/h3>\n

Plant and Food Research<\/p>\n

Ruth Butler has worked as a consulting biometrician since 1987, first in the UK at Long Ashton Research Station for seven years, and subsequently in New Zealand for Plant & Food Research and its preceding organizations. She is based near Christchurch. She primarily works with bio-protection scientists, but has worked with a range of mainly plant-based science disciplines across her career.<\/p>\n

Salvador Gezan<\/h3>\n

University of Florida<\/p>\n

Salvador Gezan is statistician\/quantitative geneticists with more than 20 years of experience in breeding, statistical analysis and genetic improvement consulting. He currently is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida, USA. He started his career at Rothamsted Research UK as a biometrician where he worked with GenStat and ASReml. Over the last 15 years he has taught for companies and university researchers many ASReml workshops around world<\/p>\n

Dr. Gezan has worked on agronomy, aquaculture, forestry, entomology, medical, biological modelling, and with many commercial breeding programs applying traditional and molecular statistical tools. His research has led to more than 90 peer review publications, and he is one of the coauthors of the textbook \u201cStatistical Methods in Biology: Design and Analysis of Experiments and Regression\u201d.<\/p>\n

Linley Jesson<\/h3>\n

Plant and Food Research<\/p>\n

Linley Jesson has come from a biological research background in evolution and ecology, and taught statistics to undergraduate Biology students for over 15 years. She joined Plant and Food Research in 2016 as a Biometrician and is currently group leader of the Data Science group.<\/p>\n

Alison Smith<\/h3>\n

University of Wollongong<\/p>\n

Alison has worked as a biometrician for more than 25 years and is currently an Associate Professor within the Centre for Bioinformatics and Biometrics at the University of Wollongong. Her main interest is the use of linear mixed models for the analysis of data from plant breeding and crop improvement programs. Her early work focussed on the analysis of genotype by environment interaction and the methods she developed are now used in all major plant breeding programs in Australia. Alison has also extensively researched improved methods of experimental design and analysis for plant quality traits that require multi-phase testing. Most recently she has been involved in the development of the Design Tableau approach for specifying linear mixed models for comparative experiments. \u00a0Alison has published over 50 refereed journal articles and has presented her research at a number of national and international statistical and scientific conferences. She has active links with industry, including most private and public plant breeding programs in Australia.<\/p>\n

Robin Thompson<\/h3>\n

Rothamsted Research<\/p>\n

Robin Thompson is a pioneering leader in the fields of statistics, quantitative genetics and animal and plant breeding. He started his career in Edinburgh in the late 1960\u2019s in the then Agricultural Research Council Unit of Statistics, later moving to the Animal Breeding Research Organisation, which ultimately became part of the Roslin Institute. He remained there until the mid 1990\u2019s when he moved to the Institute of Arable Crops Research at Rothamsted as the head of the prestigious department of statistics, established by R.A. Fisher, that laid the foundation for much of modern statistics.<\/p>\n

In the 1970\u2019s, while based at the University of Edinburgh, Robin and Desmond Patterson proposed and developed a new statistical method which came to be called REML. It now dominates in several fields including statistics, genetics, breeding, and field trial analysis. Data collected in many real-life settings are inherently unbalanced and REML provides optimized statistical methodology for such data. The foundation paper from 1971, \u201cRecovery of inter-block information when block sizes are unequal\u201d is a citation classic with more than 3,700 citations to date. These days, REML is implemented in most widely used statistical analysis packages.<\/p>\n

In addition to inventing REML, Robin has made significant contributions to the development of computationally efficient algorithms to facilitate the application of REML to large datasets. Of these, the most important is the Average Information algorithm, developed in the 1990s. Robin, together with colleagues Arthur Gilmour, Brian Cullis and Sue Welham developed the versatile and efficient software package called ASReml that is the most widely used in animal and plant breeding across the globe today.<\/p>\n

Robin has made a broad range of contributions to the development of rigorous science underpinning UK and global animal and plant breeding programmes. His collaborations with the various Edinburgh groups had, and continue to have, particular impact in UK dairy, beef and sheep breeding.<\/p>\n

Finally, Robin has made a major input to post-graduate education in Edinburgh. For many years, he taught components of the MSc in Animal Breeding and Quantitative Genetics. He was a formal supervisor of more than twenty research students and an informal mentor of many more. Robin has been incredibly generous with his ideas to both students and established researchers (perhaps because he realised he did not have the skills to see things to fruition). Several of his former students now have high international reputations. He has been awarded honorary Doctor of Science hons causa degrees by the university of Edinburgh and the Technical University of Valencia, and had a street named after him in Valencia.<\/p>\n

Helene Thygesen<\/h3>\n

Department of Conservation<\/p>\n

Helene Thygesen studied mathematics in Copenhagen and received her Ph.D. in biostatistics from Amsterdam. She has worked as a consulting statistician for various research organizations in the UK, Netherlands and Denmark. She is currently principal statistical science adviser at the Department of Conservation, New Zealand. Helene\u2019s interests are primarily in modelling of biological processes and in making statistical inference relevant to decision processes.<\/p>\n

Roger Payne<\/h3>\n

VSNi<\/p>\n

Roger Payne is the Company Secretary at VSN, now working part-time after 15 years as its Chief Science and Technology Officer. He has a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from University of Cambridge, and is a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society. He has led the development of Genstat since 1985, at Rothamsted prior to joining VSN. Roger was a statistical consultant and researcher at Rothamsted, becoming their expert on design and analysis of experiments, as well as leader of their statistical computing activities. His other statistical interests include generalized and hierarchical generalized linear models, linear mixed models, the study of efficient identification methods (with applications in particular to the identification of yeasts). Roger’s statistical research has resulted in 9 books with commercial publishers, as well as over 100 scientific papers. He has a visiting professorship at Liverpool John Moores University, and also retains an honorary position at Rothamsted, to help him keep in touch with practical statistics.<\/p>\n

[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Auld Microsoft Hi, I\u2019m Chris and I\u2019m a Principal Software Engineering manager for Microsoft living in Singapore. My team of engineers is located across Asia and Europe and we work with Microsoft\u2019s largest global customers to build advanced analytics and machine learning solutions. I studied Information Science and Law at the University of Otago […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2584,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"nvited Speakers<\/h4>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t \r\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Graham Hepworth<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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\"GStatistical Consulting: We may think we are doing well, but how do our clients see it?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Graham Hepworth has worked for over 30 years as a statistical consultant, and is currently Deputy Director of the Statistical Consulting Centre at The University of Melbourne. He began in forestry, then moved to primary industries, where most of his work was in the design and analysis of experiments, and also in sampling. In the university environment the consulting has been broader, covering government agencies and businesses as well as academic research.<\/p>\r\n

Graham\u2019s methodological research interests are mainly in the estimation of proportions by group testing (pooled testing), and in confidence intervals for discrete data. This interest arose initially from consulting in the field of plant virology. His collaborative research, much of which has also arisen from consulting, has included work in animal reproduction, plant pathology, cardiac electrophysiology, dentistry, nursing, compost science, ecology, entomology and neurology. He is also interested in researching statistical consulting itself, and how effective it is for clients.<\/p>\r\n

Graham has taught undergraduate and postgraduate subjects at the university, but in recent years he has concentrated on two intensive short courses for participants from both outside and within the University \u2013 one on experiments and the other on surveys. He recently conducted a course for Defence Science and Technology researchers on the design and analysis of simulation experiments.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Karen Meyer<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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Making the most of precious data in estimating quantitative genetic parameters\u00a0via restricted maximum likelihood<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\r\n

Karin is a professor at the University of New England, in the Animal Genetics and Breeding Unit, involved in research on quantitative genetics of beef cattle. She holds an undergraduate degree in agricultural sciences (Goettingen), and postgraduate degrees (MSc, PhD and DSc) from Edinburgh university.\u00a0
She\u00a0became interested the use of REML to estimate genetic parameters for livestock early on and has pursued this interest throughout her career. This included model development and applied analyses of large and diverse data sets. Her major impact has been through writing and freely distributing software for mixed model analyses via REML, initially DFREML now superseded by WOMBAT. Karin has authored numerous scientific papers, with a H-index on Google Scholar of 48.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Jay Ver Hoef<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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\"JayPhoto\"Spatio-temporal models for stream networks.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Jay Ver Hoef develops and evaluates new statistical methods for ecological problems, especially those involving spatial and spatio-temporal statistics (e.g. stream data, animal abundance). One of his important methodological achievements was pioneering the development of spatial statistical models for data collected along stream networks.\u00a0
|Jay works as a senior statistician for the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, a government research lab within NOAA, based in Seattle. He has adjunct positions at Oregon State University and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. <\/p>\r\n

He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and has been honoured with a number of awards, including a Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Statistical Association (Statistics in the Environment Section).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Scott Foster<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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Models for fishy data: two applications of mixture models in fisheries science.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

\"ScottScott Foster is a Senior Research Scientist at Data61, a Division of The CSIRO.\u00a0
He studied mathematics at The University of Tasmania and went on to study statistics at the University of Newcastle before \u201cgetting a real job.\u201d\u00a0 He did get a real job, well, one that paid him at any rate.
Scott started out as a consulting biometrician with the Queensland Government\u2019s Department of Primary Industries in the far north town of Mareeba. There he was exposed to a wide variety of problems, from agronomy, horticulture, aquaculture and fisheries.\u00a0
He liked learning about statistics andits applications.\u00a0 In fact, Scott liked it so much that he pursued a PhD at the University of Adelaide looking at a statistical problem for beef cattle genetics (how to make them grow faster on less food).\u00a0 <\/p>\r\n

After finishing he moved back home to Hobart, where he is still.\u00a0 Scott now works on applied problems of national importance, from marine ecology, biodiversity, fisheries and climate.\u00a0 The work covers all aspects of statistical application: design, analysis, and communication.\u00a0 He feels very lucky to be able to work on good (and important) problems, with great scientists, in his home town.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Adam Norman<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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\"AAdam Norman is currently completing a PhD with the University of Adelaide in a joint project with Australian Grain Technologies, Australia\u2019s leading plant breeding company. His project is focusing on the application of genomic selection in a plant breeding program, and ties traditional plant breeding and genetics concepts together with molecular genetics and statistics.
He completed a Bachelor of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Adelaide in 2012, and undertook an Honours project in plant breeding and molecular genetic in 2013<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Julian Taylor<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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\"Julian<\/span><\/sup>Dr. Julian completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Adelaide with a focus on statistical and computational modelling of plant breeding experiments. He then went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in CSIRO researching variable selection methods for high dimensional gene-trait association analysis. During this fellowship he collaborated closely with Ari Verbyla and they released the R package wgaim, providing users with flexible and efficient QTL analysis software for analysis if complex plant based experiments.

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In his current employment, Julian is a research biometrician located in the Biometry Hub of the University of Adelaide and is also Research and Collaborative Projects division leader of the GRDC funded statistical research group, Statistics for the Australian Grains Industry (SAGI). He collaborates and publishes widely with plant research staff within the University of Adelaide and the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, focussing on statistical genetics projects that include linkage map construction and high dimensional gene-trait association.
Recently, in close collaboration with Dave Butler, he co-authored and released the linkage map construction R package ASMap that uses the MSTmap algorithm for efficient construction of high dimensional genetic marker sets. The package has been widely adopted both locally and internationally providing plant researchers with rapid turnaround time in the construction and diagnosis of linkage maps.<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Simon Wood<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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\"SimonSimon Wood works as\u00a0a Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Bristol, and is author of the R recommended package \u2018mgcv\u2019 for smooth additive modelling.
Having trained in physics he worked in mathematical biology, before moving into statistics via statistical ecology. His current research interests are in the mathematical and computational statistics of smooth additive modelling, particularly for models beyond the exponential family, for data with short range auto-correlation, and for very large data sets requiring large models.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Greg Rebetzke<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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\"GregThe challenge of prioritising across phenotypically complex traits in breeding for highly variable environments.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Greg has a background in statistical genetics having graduate studies in statistics and quantitative genetics at Queensland (Masters) and North Carolina State (PhD) Universities.
His research focus has been in delivering genetic understanding in phenotypically complex traits and underpinning the physiological drivers of adaption and performance in rainfed wheat cropping systems. This delivery has included identification of genomic regions and improved breeding\/selection methodologies, and germplasm to breeding programs including advanced parental lines and commercial varieties.<\/p>\r\n

Specifically, this work has focussed on genetic improvement of drought tolerance and particularly improved water-use (WUE), and more recently improved nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE). The high WUE trait is an important target as water-limited performance is improved without cost to productivity in favourable seasons.
Dr. Rebetzke has demonstrated that differing traits contribute to greater WUE owing to changes in the timing and availability of water with location and season across the Australia wheatbelt. Similarly, the genes underpinning these traits are not the same and are complex to screen phenotypically thereby slowing their adoption in commercial breeding.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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Nicole Cocks<\/h5>\r\n\t\t\t\t
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\"NicoleThe challenge of prioritising across phenotypically complex traits in breeding for highly variable environments.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\r\n

Nicole completed her undergraduate studies in medical mathematics and then went on to achieve First Class Honours with a major in statistics at the University of Wollongong.
Prof. Brian Cullis and Dr. Emi Tanaka co-supervised Nicole\u2019s honours thesis for which she aimed to improve the computational efficiency of model based design with an application to multiphase experiments following her success in being awarded a UHS by the GRDC.
In her new role at CBB as an associate research fellow, Nicole is responsible for collaboration with other agricultural scientists and is funded by the GRDC.<\/p>\r\n

She is currently involved in the analysis of survey data collected on Pacific Island sea cucumbers fishers and the GRDC funded MEF project that has been in operation since 2010.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div> \r\n\r\n\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/article> \r\n\r\n\t\t\t\r\n\r\n<\/div> \r\n\r\n\r\n\t\t\t