Candidate Information for the 2007 ISBA Election (Oct 15-Nov 15)

President 2009 (President Elect 2008, Past President 2010)

• Tony O'Hagan (U Sheffield, UK)

  It's a great honour to be nominated for President of ISBA. The list of past presidents is imposing, and if elected I will do my best to uphold the high standard they have set. I have been a passionate advocate of Bayesian analysis since 1970, and here are the challenges where I hope to bring that passion to bear in the role of President. I want to see "Bayesian Analysis" become one of the top journals in Statistics; it currently doesn't have that feel for me. I want to see the ISBA world meetings working better as a mechanism to bring all our members together; that means getting bigger as well as more accessible - tricky! And I want to bring more members in from major application areas; despite our aspirations, we are perhaps not yet inclusive enough.

• Mike West (Duke U, US)

  As a member of the founding committee that established ISBA over fifteen years ago, I have been delighted with the development of the Society and its increasing role as a hub of professional activities for the Bayesian communities. ISBA has done much to advance the appreciation of Bayesian statistical science, especially in terms of international and interdisciplinary outreach. But, as an early teenage society, we have only just begun. Let us now look ahead to the next fifteen years... where do we imagine ISBA will be at its thirtieth birthday? What does and what should the membership want and expect from ISBA in the coming years? What paths should we be planning now in order to move the Society to a central, visible position within the broad field of statistical science rather than being regarded by some as representing only a small "sub-field" or "niche" area?

  Beyond the intellectual and socio-professional community ISBA represents, its tangible activities are conference organisation, the new Bayesian Analysis journal, and the administration of Bayesian awards. Success and maturation over the longer term requires planning and development to ensure the professional and financial vitality of these activities. If elected, I will focus leadership attention on:

  • Membership: Current paid-up membership is currently under 450. Active membership has been much higher (around world meeting times) and the current figure is woeful in the context of the expansion of Bayesian analysis over the last couple of decades. (The Bayesian section of ASA has over 1200 members, the curated Valencia email list over 1700). Systematising membership drives, developing connections with other professional societies, and improving recruitment of students and new researchers via university liaison are efforts to promote.
  • Connections to other societies: Visibility and membership will be enhanced by improved inter-connections with several of the leading statistical societies. This might involve increased endorsement and co-sponsorship of conferences and workshops, and initiating discussions about co-listings on membership renewals.
  • Organisation and funding: As a wholly volunteer organisation, ISBA is fragile in terms of institutional memory and long-term organisational stability. Ongoing financial organisation, including rolling fund-raising and grant generation for conference sponsorship, and especially support for participation of junior researchers at international meetings, will eventually require a longer-term dedicated strategy. With a much expanded continuing membership, ISBA will need planning to move towards a hybrid volunteer/permanent office model, either alone or via connections with other organisations.

  Some of Mike's past contributions to ISBA: Member of the ad-hoc Founding committee that established ISBA; Past member of the International Advisory Board; Chair of ISBA 2000 Scientific Committee; Led the fund-raising campaigns to establish the Lindley and DeGroot Prize foundations, to expand the Mitchell Prize foundation, and to establish the three as ISBA administered awards.

Treasurer 2008-2010

• Gabriel Huerta (U New Mexico, US)

  Gabriel Huerta is currently Associate Professor and Regents Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New Mexico. His research interests include Bayesian time series, space-time models with environmental applications, extreme value modeling and parameter uncertainty estimation for climate models. He has published papers in JRSS(B), Applied Statistics, Journal of Time Series Analysis, Statistica Sinica, JCGS and JSPI. He has served as associate editor of the ISBA Bulletin and as a member of the nominations committee of ISBA. He served on the Program Committees for JSM 2006 and Cobal II. He has been a board member of the Albuquerque Chapter of the ASA.

• Athanasios Kottas (UC Santa Cruz, US)

  Athanasios Kottas (PhD, University of Connecticut, 2000). I am currently Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at University of California, Santa Cruz. I am interested in the methodology and applications of Bayesian nonparametrics, including analysis of computer model experiments, population dynamics modeling, regression models and survival analysis. I have published papers in Scandinavian J. Stat., JSPI, JCGS, JASA and Biometrics.

Board of Directors 2008-2010 (4 openings)

• Hedibert Lopes (U Chicago GSB, US)

  I am Associate Professor of Econometrics and Statistics at the Chicago Business School. After graduating from Duke's ISDS in 2000, I returned to the Institute of Mathematics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, as Assistant Professor of Statistics. Since then I have taught several PhD-level courses on Bayesian statistics, ministered dozens of scientific talks and advised several graduate students.

  My research interests includes spatial dynamic factor models, nonlinear time series models, vector autoregressive models, multivariate mixture models, extreme value theory. I have published papers in the Biometrics, Statistica Sinica, Journal of the Time Series Analysis, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. I co-authored the book MCMC: Stochastic Simulation for Bayesian Inference (2/e).

  I served as ISBA Bulletin Editor (2002-2004). I co-founded Brazilian Chapter of ISBA (ISBrA) and launched its Bulletin. I served on the Savage Committee in 2006 and 2007. I humbly look forward to the chance of contributing to our growing community in such an honorable and important role.

• Lurdes Inoue (U Washington SPHCM, US)

  Lurdes Inoue obtained her PhD degree from Duke University in 1999. In the same year she joined the Department of Biostatistics at MD Anderson Cancer Center as a post-doctoral research associate. She joined the department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington in 2002 as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests are on Bayesian methods for biostatistics, more specifically, the design and analysis of clinical trials; models for disease progression; decision theory and cancer research. She has published papers in JASA, Biometrics, Biostatistics and TAS. She is also co-authoring a book on decision theory.

• Caitlin Buck (U Sheffield, UK)

  I am a professor in the Department of Probability and Statistics at the University of Sheffield with research interests in applied Bayesian statistics. I work mostly on applications in archaeology and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, but am also interested in issues that impact on applied Bayesian work more generally including prior elicitation. My current research projects relate to developing models for: chronology construction for ice cores, estimating radiocarbon calibration curves, and the spread of domesticated cereals during the early neolithic in Europe. Work on the radiocarbon calibration curves forms the focus of an invited talk at the Ninth Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics workshop at Carnegie Mellon in October 2007.

  I have published in a wide range of journals including: Applied Statistics, The Statistician, Bayesian Analysis, Antiquity, Quaternary Science Reviews and the Holocene. I have been an Associate Editor for Bayesian Analysis since its launch in 2006.

• Håvard Rue (Norwegian U Science & Technology, NO)

  Håvard Rue (PhD, NTNU, 1993) is currently Professor in Statistics at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in Trondheim, Norway. His main research interests are computatinal and spatial statistics, but he also does (very) applied engineering type of research in ocean wave statistics. He has been an associate editor for JRSS(B), and is currently associate editor for Annals of Statistics, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics and Statistics Surveys. He has written a book on the "green book series" of Chapman & Hall with Leonhard Held, about Gaussian Markov random fields.

• Marc Suchard (UC Los Angeles SM, US)

  Marc Suchard (PhD, UCLA, 2002; MD, UCLA, 2004). I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Biomathematics, Biostatistics and Human Genetics at UCLA. My research interests cover stochastic modeling in biology and evolution, bioinformatics/molecular sequence analysis and biomedical data analysis, all of which I approach from a Bayesian perspective. My published papers have appeared in such journals as JASA, Biometrics, PNAS, Systematic Biology, British Medical Journal and Bioinformatics. In my work, I constantly strive to bridge the chasm between statistician and biologist and, to this end, serve as an Associate Editor for both the Annals of Applied Statistics and Systematic Biology, the top research journal in the field of evolutionary biology. ISBA has met my work with enthusiasm -- my dissertation claimed the 2002 Savage Award and a recent paper garnered the 2006 Mitchell Prize -- and I look forward to repaying this support.

• Tony Pettitt (Lancaster U, UK & Queensland U Technology, AU)

  I currently hold a position in applied statistics at Lancaster University UK and additionally at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. I have long had research interests in Bayesian statistics (a paper of mine has the words "posterior probabilities" in the 1981 volume of Biometrika). From 1989 I helped establish a research profile in statistics at QUT with a strong emphasis on Bayesian statistics in a country, Australia, then not known for research in this area. My contributions in the last few years have been in applied Bayesian statistics in the areas of spatial statistics, infectious diseases (especially hospital pathogen transmission) and neurology. A jointly authored paper, published in Applied Statistics, with neurologists and other statisticians on motor unit number estimation using RJMCMC was read to the Royal Statistical Society in November 2006 whilst my other recent Bayesian work has been published in JRSSB, Biometrics, Biostatistics, Biometrika, J Theoretical Biology, and J Royal Society Interface. I was one of three co-editors of Biometrics for two years, 1999-2001. I am on the organising committee for ISBA2008 and I organised a Bayesian invited session at IBC2006.

• Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter (Johannes Kepler U, AT)

  Since 2003 I have been Professor of Applied Statistics and Econometrics at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. After obtaining my PhD (Mathematics, TU Vienna, 1988) I held various research positions in Vienna at the Technical University and the Vienna University of Economics. During these 20 years I have introduced collaborators from such diverse areas as economics, finance, hydrology, marketing and road safety research to the Bayesian approach.

  My research interests include MCMC methods, mixture modelling, Bayesian econometrics, and times series analysis using Markov switching and state space models. I have published papers in Biometrika, JASA, JBES, JRSS(B), Journal of Applied Econometrics, and Journal of Time Series Analysis. In 2006, I finished a book on Finite Mixture and Markov Switching Models which appeared in Springer Series in Statistics. Currently I am Editor of Statistical Papers, AE of Journal of Econometrics and a member of the Program Committee for the ISBA 2008 world meeting.

• Sonia Petrone (U Bocconi, IT)

  I am currently associate Professor of Statistics at Bocconi University (Milano, Italy), with a qualification (idoneità) as Full Professor since 2002. My interest and enthusiasm for Bayesian Statistics arose from studying the work of de Finetti (as an undergraduate and in my PhD (1989)). My main research areas are now in Bayesian nonparametrics, mixtures and latent variables models, dynamic models. I have published papers in JRSS(B), Scandinavian J. Stat., Canadian J. Stat., Stat. Prob. Letters, Metron. I am co-authoring a book on dynamic linear models with R. I was member of the ISBA Board in 2002-2004. I have been in the scientific and organizing committee of several international conferences, including the series of workshops on Bayesian Nonparametrics and on Bayesian Inference for Stochastic Processes (BISP). I would be pleased and honoured if my work experience could be again a useful service for ISBA as a member of the Board.