Keynote Speakers

Peihua Qiu is a professor and the founding chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1996. He then worked as a senior research consulting statistician for the Biostatistics Center at the Ohio State University during 1996-1998, and as a faculty member of the School of Statistics at the University of Minnesota during 1998-2013. Qiu has made substantial contributions in the research areas of jump regression analysis, image processing, statistical process control, survival analysis, and disease screening and surveillance. So far, he has published two research monographs and over 120 research papers in refereed journals. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He served as associate editor for a number of top statistical journals, including JASA, Biometrics, and Technometrics. He was the editor of Technometrics during 2014-2016.

More information about Dr. Qiu can be found here.

Geoff Vining is a Professor of Statistics at Virginia Tech, where from 1999 – 2006, he also was the department head. He holds an Honorary Doctor of Technology from Luleå University of Technology. He is an Honorary Member of the ASQ (the highest lifetime achievement award in the field of Quality), an Academician of the International Academy for Quality, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He is the Founding Chair of the International Statistical Engineering Association (ISEA). He is a founding member of the US DoD Science of Test Research Consortium.

Dr. Vining won the 2010 Shewhart Medal, the ASQ career award given to the person who has demonstrated the most outstanding technical leadership in the field of modern quality control. He also received the 2015 Box Medal from the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS). This medal recognizes a statistician who has remarkably contributed to the development and the application of statistical methods in European business and industry. In 2013, he received an Engineering Excellence Award from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center. He received the 2011 William G. Hunter Award from the ASQ Statistics Division for excellence in statistics as a communicator, consultant, educator, innovator, and integrator of statistics with other disciplines and an implementer who obtains meaningful results.  

Dr. Vining is the author of three textbooks. He is an internationally recognized expert in the use of experimental design for quality, productivity, and reliability improvement and in the application of statistical process control. He has extensive consulting experience, most recently with the U.S. Department of Defense through the Science of Test Research Consortium and with NASA.

More information about Dr. Vining can be found here.

Will Welch joined the Department of Statistics, UBC as a Professor in  2003, and was Head of Department from 2003 until 2008 and Interim Head  August-December 2018.  Prior to that he was at the University of  Waterloo for 16 years.  He also holds the honorary title of Visiting  Professor in the Business School, Loughborough University, UK.

Welch's research spans computer-aided design of experiments, quality  improvement, the design and analysis  of computer experiments, statistical methods for drug discovery, and  machine/statistical learning.  Please see  this link for  publications.

Welch has served on the editorial boards of the Annals of Applied  Statistics, the Canadian Journal of Statistics,  and the SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification.  He has also  served as President of the Business and Industrial Statistics Section of  the Statistical Society of Canada and as Associate Director of the  Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI). He has won the  American Statistical Association's Statistics in Chemistry Prize and is  a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.  

More information about Dr. Welch can be found here.