Overview
Grace Chiu is Senior Research
Scientist at CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics (CMIS) in
Australia, Adjunct Assistant Professor at U of Waterloo Dept. of
Statistics and Actuarial Science (UWSAS) in Canada, and Affiliate
Assistant Professor at U of Washington Dept. of Statistics in Seattle,
USA. She is 1 of 35 founding members of the UWaterloo Interdisciplinary
Centre on Climate Change. Prior to joining CMIS, she was tenure-track
Assistant Professor at UWSAS, and supervised Master’s and Ph.D.
research that integrated statistics and the environmental sciences.
Since moving to Australia, she has continued to be active in Ph.D.
supervision in Statistics. This proposed research is a continuation of
Grace’s ongoing research since her days at UWSAS, during which she was
awarded a multi-year government funded NSERC Discovery Grant (highly
competitive and main source of public research funds for Statistics
professors in Canada) to pursue the foundational research from which
this proposal stems. She was also part of two collaborative marine
ecosystem research teams including marine biologists, oceanographers,
and statisticians, which received up to seven-figure NSERC Strategic
Grants. As a student, she held prestigious scholarships throughout her
studies, and won First Prize in an IBS-WNAR Student Paper Competition
and the SSC Pierre Robillard Award for best Canadian Statistics Ph.D.
thesis from 2002. She also held two prestigious postdoctoral
fellowships. She has publications as lead author in top international
Statistics journals, such as J Amer Stat Soc and Environmetrics; for
the latter she is Associate Editor. She is a member of Australian and
international statistical professional societies (SSAI, SSC, ASA, TIES)
and is TIES Webmaster. She organized the 2007 Fields Institute Summer
Workshop on Environmetrics, and environmetrics sessions at various TIES
and SSC conferences. She has been an invited speaker and panel
discussant in numerous international statistical conferences,
workshops, and university / research agency seminars. In almost all her
publications, Grace develops new statistical methodologies to address
biological / ecological research questions, many of which had been
handled inadequately due to a lack of quantitative rigour. In her
research, Grace continues to innovate the quantitative aspect of the
understanding and prediction of biological / ecological phenomena.
Research Interests
Grace is interested in applied
statistical problems that arise in the environmental sciences. A major
goal of her research is to develop statistical methodologies with
technical details that are transparent to the target user, whose
expertise often lies not in statistical concepts, but in the subject
matter such as animal biology, ecology, and health sciences. She
focusses on developing model-based techniques that are tailored to
yield desirable properties in both practical and statistical contexts.
Her recent work includes the developing of a technique that she coined
"bent-cable regression," which is widely applicable to describing
natural phenomena that exhibit continuous response-covariate
relationships with a gradual or abrupt change; the developing of SHIPSL
and LHFI, which are scalar ecosystem health indices that, when compared
to existing indices commonly used by ecologists, can be shown to
exhibit better practical and statistical properties and be no less
user-friendly; and the statistical modeling of food webs while
incorporating the standard biological view of mass balance. Her work on
bent-cable regression resulted in First Prize at the 2002 Student Paper
Competition held by the Western North American Region (WNAR) of the
International Biometric Society, and the Pierre Robillard Award given
out by the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) for the best statistics
Ph.D. thesis from the year 2002.
Grace's recent graduate students from
the University of Waterloo have helped her to advance her research
program over the past three years.
Connections
Grace received her Ph.D. in June 2002
from Simon Fraser University (SFU) located in the Canadian province of
British Columbia. Her thesis co-supervisors were Professors Richard
Routledge and Richard Lockhart, the former of whom is both biologist
and statistician by training, and is well recognized for his research
on and contribution to the preservation of Pacific sockeye species. The
same year, she received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Pacific
Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS), which she held at both
SFU and the University of Washington in Seattle (UW) from January to
December of 2003. In 2003, she was awarded an NSERC postdoctoral
fellowship, which she held at UW from January 2004 to June 2005. As a
PIMS postdoctoral fellow, she received partial financial support from
Prof. Lockhart while pursuing her research at UW Department of
Statistics working with Prof. Peter Guttorp, with whom she continued
her work as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow. Prof. Guttorp is past
president of the International Environmetrics Society (TIES) and works
closely with scientists from the US Environmental Protection Agency,
among other organizations that conduct research on the environment.
Grace has continued to collaborate with Professors Lockhart and Guttorp
for her current research.
Grace also collaborates with Prof.
Anton Westveld (U of Nevada Las Vegas Department of Mathematical
Sciences and Center for Applied Mathematics and Statistics) in their
research on model-based ecosystem health assessment and food web
modeling.
Grace is a founding member of the
Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at U Waterloo. She was
recently consulted by (and consequently began collaboration with) Dr.
Penny Reynolds of the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center
on using the bent-cable model for autocorrelated data. For her work on
ecosystem health assessment, she has worked with Dalhousie University
colleagues Prof. Jonathan Grant and Dr. Luke Lu (Oceanography), and
Prof. Michael Dowd (Mathematics and Statistics). Until her resignation
from UWSAS, Grace held two substantial NSERC research grants as a
co-principal-investigator with Profs. Grant and Dowd, in addition to
her personal NSERC Discovery Grant.
Grace has been an active member of
SSAI, TIES, SSC, and ASA, and until recently, also WNAR. Besides
presenting her research at conferences organized by these societies,
she also served on the WNAR Regional Advisory Board from 2002 to 2004.
She has also been an invited speaker at various conferences, workshops,
and seminars at universities in Canada and the US, CSIRO (various
locations), the Environmental Protection Agency in Corvallis, Oregon,
and the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC.