(Wolfville, N.S.) – Acadia University professor Dr. Hugh Chipman has been awarded a national honour by the Centre de Recherchés Mathématiques and the Statistical Society of Canada. He is only the eleventh recipient of the CRM-SSC Prize, and the first in Atlantic Canada. He is being recognized for outstanding contributions to computational data analysis within 15 years of his Ph.D.
“This award is a testament to Dr. Chipman’s prominence within the national and international community of statistical scientists, says Dr. David MacKinnon, Acting Dean of Graduate and Research Studies at Acadia. “His leadership is outstanding and his impact is clear. While we are now celebrating the CRC-SSC Prize, it is important to note his leadership within the Acadia community, where he championed the development of the Acadia Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computation, and has both supported and been inspirational to numerous honours, graduate, and post-doctoral students. We are most fortunate to have him as a member of Acadia’s faculty.”
In a release from CRM and SSC, Dr. Chipman’s research – which develops mathematical models that assist other scientists, government agencies, and industry – is celebrated for having “advanced the statistical sciences in a broad range of areas by providing novel modelling methods. His work will have a large impact on the development of statistical methodology and its applications for many years.”
Dr. Chipman has invented new statistical models that combine flexibility and ease of use with core statistical concepts, providing researchers in a variety of disciplines with tools to discover patterns in large and complex datasets. His research focuses on ensemble models, unsupervised models for complex structures, and network models.
"With ever-increasing volumes of data, the need for quantitative tools for discovery is pressing. What hasn't changed is the core questions a statistician asks: How can we collect relevant data? What are the data telling us? What can't they tell us? The challenge is updating such ideas to increasingly complex problems," explains Dr. Chipman.
"What's really exciting is the generality of some of the modelling tools. I've had students inventing technologies that can be used for discovering new drugs, mining email traffic, and setting insurance rates. The mathematical and statistical sciences offer a unique opportunity to abstract techniques from a specific problem, and generalize them to a wide variety of challenging areas."
Dr. Chipman is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Modelling and Director of the Acadia Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computation (ACMMaC). He holds research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems, the National Institute for Complex Data Structure, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
He obtained his B.Sc. in mathematics at Acadia in 1990, and went on to complete both his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Waterloo. He then worked at the University of Chicago and University of Waterloo before returning to Acadia’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics in 2004. |
