AgResearch statisticians were out in force at the Australasian Region Conference of the IBS at Taupo in December. Neil Cox and Harold Henderson were part of the local organising committee of a very well run and enjoyable conference. Most of our team of statisticians attended the conference, and Ken Dodds and Zaneta Park gave talks while Dongwen Luo and John Koolaard presented a poster.

In November 2009 we were all pleased to receive Vanessa Cave back into the AgResearch fold, after she obtained her PhD in the UK. Her research topic was “Statistical Models for the Long-Term Monitoring of Songbird Populations: A Bayesian Analysis of Constant Effort Sites and Ring-Recovery Data”, working first with Professor Steve Brooks at Cambridge University and then with Dr Ruth King at the University of Saint Andrews, Kingdom of Fyfe. From 2004 till 2010 Roger Littlejohn has done a wonderful job maintaining the NZSA website, a duty now passed on to Vanessa.

In November 2009 Marti Anderson spent a week at the US National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, California, as part of a “think tank” working group entitled “A synthesis of patterns, analyses, and mechanisms of beta diversity along ecological gradients”. She will have two more visits there before the end of 2010, with the next trip scheduled for April. She discovered that, yes, they really do still hula hoop to funky music on the beach in Southern California! Marti also spent time with colleagues at the Plymouth Marine Lab, UK, working on the evolution of multivariate tools for the PRIMER and PERMANOVA+ computer programs. No sooner does one package get finished than it feels out of date and it is time to move on to another!

In December Marti gave a one-week international course on multivariate analysis at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, for biologists and ecologists, hosted by Sabine Dittman at Biological Sciences.

In January it was time to do the diving for the annual biodiversity surveys of rocky reef fish communities along the north-east coast of New Zealand for Marti, Adam Smith and colleague Russell Millar from the University of Auckland. With the help of the RV Hawere (University of Auckland’s research vessel) and skipper, Brady Doak, the trip was completed in record time this year. This is the tenth year running - quite a nice observational dataset for examining natural patterns in spatial and temporal variation of fish.

Barry McDonald gave a talk “Estimating the lifetime of marine concrete” at the Engineering Mathematics and Applications Conference in Adelaide, 7-10 December 2009.

From February 8-12 he was a project co-moderator at the Mathematics and Statistics-in-Industry Study Group (MISG) at RMIT in Melbourne. The project was Taxonomic analysis of marine phytoplankton from pigment data.

Assistant Professor Byungsoo Kim, from the Department of Data Science at Inje University, Korea, is visiting IIMS for the 2010 year, and doing some research with Barry.

Mat Pawley featured in Massey’s news for his work for the Ministry of Fisheries. He calls it: “getting paid to go to the beach”, but others call it: “counting shellfish across the entire North Island”. Mat has developed some nice methods of spatial sampling that will yield good estimates of the state Massey University, Albany of play for shellfish in many coastal areas.

Our PhD students have also been busy. Katharina Parry had a successful confirmation for her PhD research (Bayesian Inference for Traffic Network Models). Oliver Hannaford is currently working on a boat off the Three Kings Islands with colleagues from Te Papa (Vincent Zintzen and Clive Roberts) as part of a Marsden project to get video footage and also some collections of fish species, going down to depths of up to 1200m. We’re quantifying the changes in fish community structure with depth and latitude across New Zealand. They’ve already uncovered what look like two new species of hagfish in their work. Marie Fitch gave a talk on her PhD research (High dimensional graphical models) at the Australian Young Statisticians conference in September 2009 and was relieved to note she wasn’t the oldest ‘young’ statistician!

In other news, Beatrix and Danny had baby Sadie on 14 October! Paul Cowpertwait has (sadly) left us to find new horizons at AUT, but we are reassured by the fact that he will be in good company with Jeff Hunter there as well and, hey, it is not that far away! He is maintaining links with our group through his graduate students as well. And finally we look forward to welcoming Kirsten Rodgers who has landed a Massey University doctoral scholarship to work with Marti Anderson and will be joining us to start her PhD in April of this year. The topic for her work is: “Natural tags to reveal ‘sources’ and ‘sinks’ for New Zealand’s coastal marine species” and will include interactions with our colleagues, Nick Shears (University of Auckland) and Tom Trnski and Wilma Blom (Auckland War Memorial Museum).

Daniel Walsh and Beatrix Jones with Albert and new baby Sadie.

The last weekend in November Beatrix Jones attended the New Zealand Molecular Ecology conference. This is a fun, informal conference held each year at a beautiful, ‘wild’ location, featuring many short talks with high student representation. Beatrix presented a paper entitled “Blocks of Linked SNPs for Parentage Analysis”. There was also an exciting optional excursion: rafting on the Kaituna river!

During the summer Paul Cowpertwait visited his colleague Andrew Metcalfe in the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Adelaide, to complete a book on using R for the analysis of time series.

In January Marti was an invited plenary speaker at the International Temperate Reefs Symposium at the University of Adelaide, where she presented a talk entitled “When the plot gets muddy: models for environmental management in estuarine systems”. Mat Pawley also spoke at the conference about longterm monitoring data from Long Bay, the results of contract research for the Auckland Regional Council.

Huge congratulations to Ross Ihaka, for being awarded the American Statistical Association’s inaugural biannual Statistical Computing and Graphics Award, jointly with Robert Gentleman, for their work in initiating the R Project for Statistical Computing. R, which was born in a corridor in Auckland, is now used by millions of people worldwide and has changed the way that scientists and business professionals interact with data. Ross will receive his award at the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver in August, before an audience of thousands. Congratulations, Ross!

The department is in the midst of some significant comings and goings. We are delighted that Thomas Lumley of the University of Washington in Seattle has accepted our offer of Chair in Biostatistics, and will arrive later this year.

Thomas will be an enormous asset for our department. At about the same time, the University of Washington will gain not one but two of our staff, as Sharon Browning and Brian Browning have accepted prestigious appointments there. Sharon will be a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, and Brian will be an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics. Sharon and Brian have been in Auckland since 2005, and have gained international recognition for their work in statistical genetics, including jointly holding a Best Paper Award from the International Genetic Epidemiology Society for the best paper published in Genetic Epidemiology in 2007. We wish them every success in their new positions and hope we will be able to entice them back to New Zealand soon!

We also said a reluctant farewell to senior tutor Rachel Cunliffe in November. Rachel joined our department in 2000 after a stellar student career, and has made a huge contribution to our Stage 1 team and outreach activities, including Census At School. She is currently focusing on motherhood, and the family are planning to travel overseas.

In November the department held a dinner jointly to say goodbye to Rachel Cunliffe, to mark Alastair Scott’s 70th birthday, and to celebrate our 15th birthday as a separate department. Or was it mainly to guzzle enough chocolate cake to bring fortitude for the upcoming week? The following week we hosted four major outreach activities. Ross Parsonage and his team organised the annual Statistics Teachers Day, titled ‘Laying foundations for inference’. This was the most successful ever, and with enrolments capped at 150 the day was well-oversubscribed by secondary school teachers from around the country. Yannan Jiang and Stephen Vander Hoorn organised the Biostatistics Workshop on Cluster Randomised Trials, with keynote speaker Martin Bland from the University of York, who presented two entertaining talks at Taupo the following week. Thomas Lumley, our professor-to-be, also presented a full-day R workshop. As if the walls of our building weren’t pulsating with enough creative energy after all that, there was Girls into Science to cap it off. Making everything run smoothly throughout were our awesome team of Alexandra Miliotis and Nancy Wong from the Stats Office. Thanks to Alex and Nancy for all their hard work: they must have breathed a sigh of relief when everyone disappeared to Taupo at the end of the week.

Congratulations to Chris Wild, Alastair Scott, and Alan Lee for their success in the most recent Marsden round: a well-deserved $600K will go towards their investigations on ‘Efficient analysis with biased samples’ over the next three years. PhD student Gustavo Amorim is about to arrive from Brazil to begin his PhD work on the project.

Our PhD students have had some notable successes. Katrina Poppe won the prize for Best Student Talk at the Australasian Biometric Conference in Taupo, and Jonathan Briggs was runner-up. Lyndon Walker won the statistics prize at the NZ Maths and Statistics Postgraduate Conference in Foxton Beach in November. Drs Debbie Leader and Derek Law successfully defended their theses: Debbie has started a Senior Tutorship at Massey, and Derek is working for Harmonic research company in Auckland. Two of our recent PhD graduates have gained lectureships in New Zealand:
James Russell has just been appointed as a lecturer in Biology at the University of Auckland, and Steven Miller was appointed as a lecturer in Statistics at the University of Waikato last year.

And finally, Stephane Guindon and Ivan Kojadinovic have both celebrated the arrival of baby sons in the last couple of months. Welcome to Elliott Guindon and Damien Kojadinovic. This brings our departmental offspring to a total of 22 children since the year 2000 - of which 19 have been boys and only 3 girls! This latest highly significant news brings our departmental p-value to less than 0.001 against a hypothesis of equal sex ratio. Can anyone suggest a mechanism that might cause statisticians and statistical administrators, both male and female, to produce more boys than girls? Or is there just something in the departmental water cooler...?

Rachel Fewster

University of Otago