The Australian Capital Territory Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia proudly presents the Wilson Lecture. The lecture is in honour of the late Professor Sue Wilson and her immense contributions to the statistics and bioinformatics community across Canberra, Australia, and globally. The Wilson Lecture is held as the branch's final lecture every second year, alternating with the Knibbs Lecture.
Date: Tuesday 24 November 2026
Time: 5:45 pm - 6:45 pm AEDT followed by dinner (details below)
Format: Hybrid
Venue: Allan Barton Forum, ANU College of Business & Economics, Level 2, CBE Building 26C, The Australian National University, Acton ACT 2601
(ANU Building 26C)
Online by Zoom: https://anu.zoom.us/j/81461453421?pwd=BN3ugi3WG2q77stzYUb4bjyu8CPFRh.1
NB: registration not required for this event
Abstract: Statistical Methodology: the Backbone of Data Science
Professor Sue Wilson (1948–2020) developed statistical methodology inspired by scientific problems, from statistical genetics and epidemiology to bioinformatics, published more than 200 papers, and was a generous mentor to early career women. In her 1997 Knibbs Lecture she asked “Who counts and why?”, and recent Australian data suggest the question still matters, particularly for women in statistics. I will reflect on Sue’s career and my friendship with her, then describe my own research in the physical sciences. A distribution I co-developed for palaeomagnetism now underpins a highly accurate method for detecting underground nuclear explosions, and bootstrap tests following the principles of Hall and Wilson (1991) enable inference for geophysical tensors. Data science and geoscience have both been identified as science capability areas experiencing rapidly growing demand in Australia, creating huge opportunities for research impact where they meet. As Sue’s work and mine show, methods developed for one field often find unexpected uses in another. Statistical methodology is the backbone of data science, and Australia needs to invest in it.
Presenter bio: Janice Scealy, ANU
Janice Scealy is an Associate Professor in the Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Statistics at the Australian National University. She is a mathematical statistician who develops new statistical methods for analysing compositional data and data on spheres and manifolds, motivated largely by problems in the Earth sciences. She has published widely in leading statistics journals, including JASA and JRSSB, and her joint work on identifying underground nuclear explosions attracted worldwide media attention. Janice held an ARC DECRA Fellowship (2018–2022), was awarded the Australian Academy of Science’s Moran Medal in 2021, and has been awarded an ARC Future Fellowship (2027–2030).
Dinner:
After the talks we will be holding a dinner at 7:15 pm at Kinn Thai Restaurant, Shop B09/10 Canberra Centre, 148 Bunda Street, Canberra.
If you plan to attend the dinner, please RSVP by 5:00 pm on Monday 23 November by entering your details in the SSA ACT Branch dinner attendance sheet, or by contacting Warren at wjmstats@outlook.com or 0407 916 868. Please treat your RSVP as a firm commitment rather than an expression of interest.
If you need to withdraw after the deadline, please remove your name from the attendance sheet and notify Warren by phone or text on 0407 916 868. Please note that last-minute requests to attend during the event cannot be accommodated, so be sure to RSVP through the attendance sheet in advance.
NOTE: SSA ACT branch are offering discounts to SSA early career and student members who attend dinner! For this meeting, dinners will be a fixed charge of $15 for student members and $25 for early career members.
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