NB: Voting closed at midnight on 15 October 2019.
At the end of this year, five Ordinary members of Council (our trustees) will complete their four-year terms of office. This means that we will need to elect five new Council members to fill these vacancies, with the newly-elected Ordinary members commencing their terms of office on 1 January 2020.
Having taken into account all the suggestions received from the membership, Council has nominated the seven fellows named below to stand election for the five vacancies (as Society regulations require that Council put forward for election two more nominations than the number of vacancies).
The seven nominees for the five vacancies on Council in alphabetical order:
Peter Elias
Peter is a labour economist and professor at the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick. He has a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Manchester; an MA in Business Studies from the University of Sheffield and he undertook his statistical training as part of his PhD in labour economics at the University of California (Berkeley). During his career at Warwick he has undertaken a wide variety of research projects, ranging from the evaluation of labour market programmes to the provision of technical assistance with classification and measurement to over 30 national statistical agencies worldwide. His work has been widely published and he is currently a section editor for the journal Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies.
He has been a fellow of the RSS for the past 20 years and currently chairs the RSS Data Ethics Special Interest Group. He has also been a member of many national and international bodies concerned with the development and better use of statistics for decision-making. Most notable in this respect was his work associated with chairing an OECD Expert Group tasked to produce the report Research Ethics and New Forms of Data for Social and Economic Research.
Duncan Elliott
Duncan has worked at the Office for National Statistics for over 16 years, spending the whole of that time in Methodology, 13 years of which he has spent on methods for time series analysis in official statistics where he is responsible for research, training and supporting time series methods used in Official Statistics.
He is the UK representative to the European Seasonal Adjustment Expert Group and is also a member of the European Seasonal Adjustment Centre of Excellence. More recently he was on the scientific committee for the New Techniques and Technologies for official Statistics 2019 conference and is an associate guest editor for the special edition of the Journal of Official Statistics for NTTS.
Duncan has collaborated with academics co-supervising PhD students researching time series methods for official statistics and teaches courses on time series and seasonal adjustment for official statistics.
Katie Harron
Katie is a senior lecturer at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. She completed her PhD on statistical methods for data linkage at UCL in 2014, and was subsequently awarded a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral fellowship which she undertook at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto. Katie’s research uses statistical methods to exploit the rich data that are collected about populations as we interact with health, social care, and educational services throughout our lives. Her aim is to improve our understanding of the health of individuals from birth to young adulthood. She is passionate about increasing the public understanding of statistics, and engaging the public in her research. For example, she has run workshops with teenage mothers to explore public attitudes about using administrative health and education data to evaluate early intervention programmes.
Katie is an active member of the RSS and has delivered many presentations at RSS events and conferences, starting with her first ever conference presentation at the Young Statisticians’ Meeting in 2010. She is an associate editor for JRSS-A, a founding member of the Data Ethics Special Interest Group, and was a member of the General Applications Section from 2015-2018. Her favourite event that she organised was ‘Statistics in the Media’, which attracted a full house at Errol Street in 2015. Her work involves close collaborations with a number of key stakeholders for national data, including the Office for National Statistics, NHS Digital, and Public Health England. Katie is also a member of the Confidentiality Advisory Committee, a national regulatory body responsible for overseeing access to identifiable data for research.
Rachel Hilliam
Rachel is a Senior Lecturer in statistics at the Open University, where she contributes to teaching across all levels of the statistics curriculum. Her involvement with the first year undergraduate statistics module alone means that her teaching reaches roughly 1000 mature part-time students per year. She is an experienced teacher and communicator of statistics with a strong interest in pedagogy and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
As Director of Teaching for Mathematics and Statistics, Rachel was responsible for the creation of new qualifications in statistics and data science which equip adults with the chance to retrain and upskill in statistics whilst working. She has a broad knowledge of higher education having worked in several other institutions, most recently as Associate Professor and Director of Student Experience in the Statistics Department at the University of Warwick.
Rachel is also an active statistical practitioner having previously held the post of Medical Statistician at Derby Hospitals NHS Trust, where she had responsibility for designing and analysing clinical trials. She continues to provide training and consultancy advice to clinicians both in hospitals and through her association with Derby University where she is a visiting research fellow in the College of Health and Social Care.
Rachel is an active member of the RSS. She is currently on the Professional Affairs Committee, is a committee member of the newly formed Special Interest Group in Teaching Statistics and is an RSS university accreditation assessor. Previously she has been the secretary for the West Midlands RSS local group.
Lisa McFetridge
Lisa is a Lecturer in Statistics in the Mathematical Sciences Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. She completed her PhD in 2014, which developed robust joint models to analyse changing biomarkers and the risk of death for haemodialysis patients. Alongside furthering this work, Lisa’s current research interests focus on the advancement of mixed effects models, analysis of emotions using machine learning techniques and innovative survival analysis for medical research. Whilst finishing her PhD, Lisa was a Principal Statistician at Exploristics working on the analysis of observational studies, clinical trial data and biomarker analysis.
Lisa is an active member of the RSS. She is Programme Chair for the 2019 RSS International Conference which will be hosted in Belfast in September. Since 2013, Lisa has been a judge for the RSS Excellence in Journalism Awards. She was Chair of the RSS Northern Ireland local group (2017-18), joining the committee in 2015, and, during her time as Chair, the NI local group was awarded the 2018 incentivisation scheme for the increased uptake in local RSS fellows. Lisa was a member of the Young Statisticians Section from 2013-17 during which she was Meetings Secretary, Secretary and Vice-Chair and Lisa was a lead organiser each year for the YSS Statistical Showcase and judge for the annual Statistical Excellence Award for Early-Career Writing in conjunction with Significance. In 2014, Lisa introduced the annual YSS Statistically Significant Careers event at Queen’s to promote the Society locally to career-young statisticians.
Lisa also has a strong involvement in other Societies. She is Secretary of the Irish Statistical Association and Treasurer of the International Biometric Society British and Irish Region. She was one of the main organisers of the ISA’s Conference on Applied Statistics in Ireland 2014 and, in 2016, she was invited to sit on the EPSRC Mathematical Sciences Early Career Forum.
David McLernon
David is a senior research fellow in medical statistics at the University of Aberdeen. Prior to joining the University of Aberdeen, he completed his PhD at the University of Dundee in 2008 which involved developing prognostic models for patients presenting in primary care with abnormal liver function tests. Since then, David has continued to conduct research in the area of risk prediction modelling particularly in the clinical discipline of fertility medicine within which he leads several projects and supervises postgraduate students. David has international collaborations with methodologists and clinicians and is an active member of the Strengthening Analytical Thinking for Observational Studies (STRATOS) Initiative Group on Evaluating diagnostic tests and prediction models. He lectures on different aspects of applied statistics to clinicians, undergraduate and postgraduate students.
David is an active member of the Society and is currently secretary of the Highlands Local Group. He was also an active member of the Young Statistician’s Committee (2017-2018). He has Chaired a biennial Highlands event (Young Researchers Using Statistics Symposium) which brings together career young researchers who use novel statistical methods to present their work, and has been involved in public engagement events promoting statistics.
Jamie Sergeant
Jamie is a Lecturer in Biostatistics at the University of Manchester. In this role he collaborates with clinical and scientific colleagues to tackle medical research questions and teaches statistics to non-statisticians. A particular focus of his research is on developing models to predict probabilities of health outcomes for individuals with or at risk of developing musculoskeletal health conditions.
Prior to joining the University of Manchester as a postdoctoral researcher, Jamie studied Mathematics at Imperial College, completed a doctorate in Statistics at the University of Oxford and qualified and worked as a secondary school maths teacher in the state sector. He is interested in statistics education at all levels, from schools through to higher education, in the communication of statistical ideas and in statistical literacy in wider society. In higher education, Jamie is particularly interested in supporting the training and development of teachers and students who are not statisticians, and in gaining better recognition of the mutually-beneficial relationship between research, teaching and advising others as part of the work of a practising statistician.
Jamie has been a member of the RSS Education and Statistical Literacy Committee since 2014 and has been the RSS representative on the British Science Association Mathematical Sciences Section Committee since 2016. In this latter role, Jamie has helped ensure the inclusion of statistical events and speakers at the British Science Festival. He has presented at and organised RSS Conference sessions on teaching and communicating statistics and is excited about working with the Society’s new Teaching Statistics special interest group.