Statistical Society of Australia - ACT Branch

SSA ACT Branch - Knibbs and Wilson Lectures

In honour of Sir George Handley Knibbs' impact on statistics in Australia, the SSA ACT Branch holds a annual lecture named after him. In 2024, the SSA ACT Branch introduced the Wilson lecture, to honour Professor Sue Wilson and her immense contributions to the statistics and bioinformatics community in Canberra, across Australia, and globally. The Knibbs and Wilson lectures run in alternating years, with the Wilson taking place on even-years cycles and the Knibbs lecture being held on odd-year cycles.

The Knibbs (left image) and Wilson (right image) lectures are a main event for the branch, with the annual dinner held in conclusion of the lecture. The event is generally the final meeting of the year, held in late November or early December. An eminent statistician, not necessarily from Australia, is invited to present a lecture on a topic of interest to an audience of primarily statisticians.

Short Biographies

Sir George Handley Knibbs Kt, CMG (1858 - 1929) began his career as a surveyor in the New South Wales Survey Department. He taught mathematics and physics at the University of Sydney and later became Director of Technical Education for NSW. It was he who instituted the Official Year Book; throughout his tenure as Commonwealth Statistician (commenced in 1906 and concluded in 1921) he maintained his strong mathematical and statistical interest in population problems, and published The Mathematical Theory of Population, first separately in 1917 and later as an appendix to the Report on the Australian Census of 1921. He was much concerned with the Malthusian theory that population would outgrow food supplies, a threat which has become even more serious today. Knibbs retired in 1921 to become Director of the Institute of Science and Industry; he was succeeded in 1922 by Charles H. Wickens (1872 - 1939) who had also joined the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics in 1906 from Western Australia.

Professor Susan Ruth Wilson (1948 - 2020) was one of Australia’s foremost researchers in biological statistics and bioinformatics, pioneering many of the rigorous statistical techniques that practitioners use today for analysing and interpreting large-scale genomic data. In recognition of her many contributions to the statistical community, Sue was an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). She was also President of the International Biometric Society (IBS) from 1998-1999 and was awarded the inaugural E. A. Cornish Award for her contributions to the IBS in 2011. In 2017, Sue was made the inaugural Senior Fellow of the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society.

Two longer biographies of George Knibbs may be found here

A longer biography of Sue Wilson may be found here

Previous Knibbs (1976-2023; then from 2025 occurring in odd years) and Wilson (from 2024 occurring in even years) Lecture speakers

Year	Speaker	Title of lecture	Speaker Affiliation	Discussants
1976	Prof Herbert David	The theory of competing risks	Iowa State University, USA	Dr Stefan Maritz (CSIRO), Prof Hasofer (UNSW)
1977	Prof David Cox	Foundations of statistical inference: the arguments for eclecticism	Imperial College, London, UK	Prof Pat Moran (ANU), Prof Finch (Monash) Prof Toby Lewis (Hull)
1978 (ASC4)	Prof Oscar Kempthorne	Foundations of statistical thinking and reasoning	Iowa State University, USA
1979	Dr Bill Norton	Information problems of economic advisers	Reserve Bank	Dr Higgins (Treasury), Dr Ironmonger (Uni of Melb), Mr Ken Foreman (ABS)
1980	Prof Toby Lewis	Society, statistics and statisticians	Open University, UK	Prof Evan Williams (Uni of Melb), Prof Ted Hannan (ANU), Dr Chris Heyde (CSIRO)
1981	Dr Joe Gani	An adventure in publishing: Eighteen years of the Applied Probability Trust	CSIRO	Prof Evan Williams (Uni of Melb), Dr Chris Heyde (CSIRO)
1982		No Knibbs lecture held this year
1983	Mr E.K. (Ken) Foreman	Survey design	Research School of Social Sciences, ANU
1984	Prof Leslie Kish	Sample surveys vs experiments, controlled observations, censuses	University of Michigan, USA	Mr Dennis Trewin (ABS), Mr Ken Brewer (BAE)
1985	Dr Richard Tweedie	Public sector statistics in the private sector: some examples and problems in their use	SIROMATH Pty Ltd
1986	Dr Terry Speed	The role of statisticians in CSIRO: Past, Present, and Future	CSIRO	Dr Richard Tweedie (Siromath), Prof Ted Hannan (ANU)
1987	Prof Alastair Scott	Interpreting confidence intervals for opinion polls	University of Auckland, NZ	Mr Ken Brewer (ANU), Mr David Leaver (ABS)
1988	Prof Peter Hall	Computer intensive statistical methods: What does the future hold?	Australian National University	Dr Nick Fisher (CSIRO), Dr Mike Osborne (ANU)
1989	Dr Ron Sandland	Who owns data analysis?	CSIRO
1990	Prof Niels Becker	Statistical challenges of AIDS	La Trobe University	Prof Chip Heathcote (ANU), Dr Patty Solomon (ANU)
1991	Prof Murray Aitkin	Statistical consulting, research, computing, theory and teaching - the roles of a university Statistical Consulting Centre	University of Lancaster, UK	Mr Ross Cunningham (ANU), Mr Richard Morton (CSIRO)
1992	Dr Alan Gleeson	The changing role of Biometricians in NSW Agriculture	NSW Agriculture	Dr John Reynolds (Vic Dept of Ag), Dr Jeff Wood (CSIRO)
1993	Dr Dennis Trewin	A comparison of two statistical systems	Statistics New Zealand, NZ	Dr Fellegi (StatsCanada), Mr Castles (ABS)
1994	Prof Charles McGilchrist	Generalised linear mixed models	National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU	Dr Alan Welsh (ANU), Mr Richard Morton (CSIRO)
1995	Mr Bill McLennan AM	The ABS product - issues and prospects	Australian Bureau of Statistics	Dr Tom Karmel (DEET), Dr Bruce Armstrong (AIHW)
1996	Prof Chip Heathcote	Mortality surfaces and health processes	Australian National University	Dr Christabel Young (ANU), Dr Richard Madden (AIHW)
1997	Prof Susan Wilson	Who counts and why? A perspective of the history of women and men in statistics	Australian National University	Prof Joe Gani (ANU), Ms Susan Linacre (ABS)
1998	Prof Geoff Eagleson	Selling statistics: is it time to segment the market?	University of New South Wales	Prof Alan Welsh (ANU), Ms Gemma van Halderen (ABS)
1999	Dr Nick Fisher	Statistics and performance management	CSIRO	Prof John Robinson (USYD) Mr Dennis Trewin (ABS)
2000	Prof Alan Welsh	Incomplete detection in enumeration surveys: Whither distance sampling?	Australian National University	Dr Ann Cowling (ANU) Mr Geoff Lee (ABS)
2001		No Knibbs lecture held this year
2002	Prof Oliver Mayo	To what extent has Fisher's Research Programme been fulfilled In Australia?	CSIRO	Professor Sue Wilson (ANU) Prof Andrew Cockburn (ANU)
2003	Prof William Dunsmuir	Estimation and modelling in time series of dependent counts	University of New South Wales	Professor Ross Maller (ANU) Dr Steven Stern (FAS, ANU)
2004	Prof Adrian Baddeley	The difficulty of selling cheap things	University of Western Australia	Professor Alan Welsh (ANU) Dr Simon Barry (BRS)
2005	Prof Peter Thomson	Hidden markov models: Some examples of their application and reflections on their use	Statistical Research Ltd., NZ
2006	Dr Richard Jarrett	The Complexity of risk	CSIRO
2007	Prof Rob Hyndman	Population forecasting and the importance of being uncertain	Monash University
2008	Prof Matt Wand	Variational approximations in Statistics	University of Wollongong	Dr Mark Clements (ANU) Mr Daniel Elazar (ABS)
2009	Prof Joe Gani	Mathematical models for the spread of epidemics	Australian National University	Prof Alan Welsh (ANU) Prof Daryl Daley (Uni of Melbourne)
2010	Prof Neville Weber	Scaling courses for university admission purposes	University of Sydney	Helen Strauch (ACT Edu) Warren Müller (CSIRO)
2011	Prof Chris Field	Robustness as applied to marine ecology	University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada	Prof John Robinson (Uni of Sydney) A. Prof Gavin Huttley, (ANU)
2012	Prof David Griffiths	The thrown coin: who gives a toss? Adventures in the design of the golden die and in binary regression	University of Wollongong	Alice Richardson Michael Adena (Datalytics)
2013	Prof Louise Ryan	On the challenge of covariate selection in environmental epidemiology	University of Technology Sydney	Prof Steven Roberts (ANU) Dr Shuvo Bakar (CSIRO)
2014	Prof Noel Cressie	Statistical modelling of big, spatial, non-Gaussian data: The MODIS cloud mask product	University of Wollongong	Dr Philip Kokic (CSIRO) Dr Daniel Elazar (ABS)
2015	Prof Bendix Carstensen	The resurrection of time as a continuous concept in biostatistics, demography and epidemiology	Steno Diabetes Center, Copenhagen, Denmark	Ian McDermid (ANU)
2016	Prof David Kalisch	'Big Data', official statistics and national statistical offices	Australian Statistician, Australian Bureau of Statistics
2017	A/Prof Rachel Fewster	Statistical stocking fillers	University of Auckland	A/Prof Han Lin Shang (ANU)
2018	Prof Eric Stone	Is the discipline of statistics destined for disruption?	Australian National University
2019	Prof James Carpenter	Missing data: A statistical framework for practice	London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine	Dr Alice Richardson (ANU)
2020	Prof Ray Carroll	A Personal Tour: The complex nature of nutrient and food intakes, and the effects this complexity has on understanding dietary distributions and their effects on mortality and chronic disease	Texas A&M University	Prof Alan Welsh (ANU); In honour of Prof Welsh's 60th birthday
2021	Prof David Steel	Perspectives on sample surveys	University of Wollongong
2022	Dr Heather Battey	The role of R. A. Fisher and D. R. Cox in the development of statistics	Imperial College London
2023	Prof Hans-Peter Piepho	A world of differences	University of Hohenheim
2024 (Wilson Lecture)

Join us

The Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) is the home for professionals working in statistics. A place where you belong, connect with others, advance your career and feel inspired.

Our core purpose is to connect you with great people and great opportunities, so you can be successful in your current role and with your career aspirations.

Join now

Statistical Society of Australia (SSA)

PO Box 213

Belconnen ACT 2616 Australia

02 6251 3647

www.statsoc.org.au

ABN 82 853 491 081

Please direct enquiries to:

the SSA Team via email at

contact@statsoc.org.au

@StatSocAus

Privacy Security Sitemap

Website by Converge Design