MEET THE KEYNOTES
Professor Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel is Professor of the Practice and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Statistical Science and the Director of First-Year Experience at Duke University. She is also a Developer Educator at Posit, PBC, an open-source data science software company, formerly RStudio Inc. Mine's work focuses on innovation in statistics and data science pedagogy, with an emphasis on computing, reproducible research, student-centred learning, and open-source education. She also works on research projects that aim to assess the effectiveness of these approaches with respect to learning and retention.
Mine has co-authored four open-source statistics textbooks as part of the OpenIntro project at the introductory college and advanced high school level, is the creator and maintainer of Data Science in a Box and has been developing and teaching various massive open online courses, including the popular Statistics with R specialization on Coursera. In 2021, Mine was awarded the Robert V. Hogg Award for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Statistics.
Mine is one of the co-leads the international effort for putting on ASA DataFest, a two-day competition in which teams of undergraduate students work to reveal insights into a rich and complex data set, annually at over fifty institutions across the globe.
Professor Dianne Cook
Dianne Cook is a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University in Melbourne, after 20 years at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on statistical graphics, with an emphasis on interactive visualisation of high-dimensional data and statistical inference for data visualisation. At Monash, she teaches courses in machine learning and data analysis, and for the broader community leads workshops on data visualisation and reproducible research. At Iowa State, her students included Hadley Wickham and Yihui Xie. She is one of the developers of GGobi, and the R package tour that contains the high-dimensional visualisation tools from GGobi. With Ursula Laa she is the author of Interactively Exploring High-dimensional Data and Models in R which can be considered the successor of Interactive and Dynamic Graphics for Data Analysis: With R and GGobi, written with Deborah F. Swayne.
Di is a past editor of both The R Journal and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and the author of several R packages, including nullabor, naniar, GGally, woylier, sugarbag, sugarglider,and brolgar. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Board Member of the R Foundation. Di is actively involved in R Ladies Melbourne, the Statistical Computing and Visualisation Section of the Statistical Society of Australia, and the Graphics and Computing Sections of the American Statistical Association.
Di is passionate about open-source software, ethics and transparency, and achieving gender parity in society. She is also passionate about sports and the environment. Many of the R packages originating from the NUMBATs group at Monash, of which Di is a member, are based on Australian wildlife, many cute and wonderful creatures. Also, data sets compiled for teaching include many from the environment, and women’s sports statistics, along with details on how they were obtained.
Sir Peter Donnelly
Sir Peter Donnelly is Emeritus Professor University of Oxford and CEO of genomics PLC. He is a world-renowned geneticist and statistician whose pioneering research has advanced our understanding of human genetics and transformed biomedical science.
After completing his PhD at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, Sir Peter progressed into an academic career, and was appointed to a Professorial Chair at the University of London in 1988, at the age of just 29. After a Professorship at the University of Chicago, he was head of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. From 2007 to 2018, Sir Peter was Director of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford, where he played a central role in groundbreaking national and international genomic research initiatives, including the International HapMap Project and the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium which identified genetic variants responsible for specific aspects of health and disease. His scientific papers have received over 100,000 citations.
Sir Peter’s studies of genetic distributions in living populations to trace human evolutionary history has informed research in evolutionary biology, as well as medical treatment for genetic disorders. He's also a leading expert on DNA analysis and the use of forensic science in criminal trials; he's an outspoken advocate for bringing sensible statistical analysis into the courtroom. Sir Peter’s early academic work developed key aspects of coalescent theory, a mathematical model for tracing genetic lineages which revolutionised the approach to population genetics and laid the groundwork for most modern genetic studies.
Sir Peter is also a co-founder, and since 2017, CEO, of Genomics Limited, a pioneering healthcare company that is using genetics to both transform disease prevention and power drug discovery. He was recently named as one of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs to have started a company after age 50.
His scientific leadership has earned him many awards, including the Mitchell Prize from the American Statistical Association, the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society, and lifetime achievement awards from the Genetics Society and the American Society of Human Genetics. In 2019, he was knighted for his services to the understanding of human genetics in disease and 3 years later, he was awarded the Royal Society’s prestigious Gabor Medal. He is Doctor of Science honoris causa of the University of Queensland and of the University of Melbourne, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries.
Professor Rob Gould
Rob Gould is a teaching professor at UCLA in the Department of Statistics and Data Science and, since 1998, has overseen the department's undergraduate teaching programs. Rob has been a national and international leader and pioneer in statistics and data science education for more than 25 years. In 2007 he established Technology Innovations in Statistics Education, an e-journal publishing peer-reviewed work on the intersection of statistics (and now data science) education and technology, of which he was editor until 2024. In 2011, recognising that undergraduate students need opportunities to work with data beyond the classroom he founded DataFest, a two-day data analysis competition and celebration of data. DataFest has turned into an international phenomenon, with ASA formally sponsoring it since 2016, and held more than 60 sites with over 4000 students participating. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and has chaired the ASA Education Section and the Joint Committee of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the ASA. In 2019 he was awarded the ASA Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award and the US Conference on Teaching Statistics Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2025 he was awarded the Founders Award of the American Statistical Association.
Rob has also initiated and led in statistics and data science school education. He was a co-author on the 2005 college GAISE report and served on the 2017-2020 GAISE preK-12 report writing team. In 2014, with funding by the National Science Foundation, Rob led a team that launched the UCLA Introduction to Data Science (IDS) curriculum, the first year-long secondary-school data science curriculum in the US. To date, over 50,000 students have taken the course. In 2024, to support the continued growth of that program he co-founded, with Suyen Machado and Tim Jacobee, ThinkData Ed (TDE), a non-profit dedicated to providing professional support for secondary school teachers of data science. He is currently faculty advisor of the Data Science Education Center (DSEC) within the Department of Statistics and Data Science at UCLA, which supports K-12 data science education through the development of curricular materials, technology and research. Together, DSEC and TDE promote universal statistical and data literacy for K-12 students. In 2018, Rob organized an ASA Two-Year College Data Science Summit. Among his extensive publications is the introductory statistics textbook Exploring the World Through Data, which was designed with two-year college students in mind.
Dr Elena Proden
Elena Proden is a development economist and sustainability researcher and expert with over 15 years of experience working for the United Nations. She has worked across different world regions and has prior experience in academia and the private sector. She currently works as Senior Specialist leading (United Nations Institute for Training and Research) UNITAR’s 2030 Agenda team which develops and implements capacity development projects for both government and non-government stakeholders. Together with UNSSC, her team is providing the Secretariat for the UNSDG:Learn partnership, which includes 65+ UN and non-UN agencies. Building on this partnership, UNITAR, UNIDO and SDSN have been collaborating to develop a new initiative, the Capabilities 4 the Future Hub. The Hub is designed to support industrial authorities and the private sector in developing capacities needed to implement SDG-aligned industrial policies and optimize global value chains for sustainable development. Dr Proden is currently the Chair of the Global Network of Institutions for Statistical Training, having extensively worked on national development planning, SDG reporting and data partnerships for evidence-based decision-making.
Prior to that, Elena worked in and with the private sector – in SMEs and multinationals – in emerging and developed markets. Her previous experience also includes sub-national, public sector projects aimed at implementing the reform of higher education programs, and more specifically, the revision of the curriculum to help build the skills of young specialists to design projects and foster innovation in the context of a transition economy.
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