CANSSI’s Board of Governors oversees all of the Institute’s activities and advises the Director and Deputy Director on strategic planning and governance.
At the CANSSI Annual General Meeting on June 7, Director Don Estep acknowledged the contributions of three departing members of the Board: Farouk Nathoo (University of Victoria), Louis-Paul Rivest (Laval University), and Xuebin Zhang (University of Victoria). All three will wrap up their terms at the end of June.
In their place, the representatives of CANSSI’s member institutions elected Ejaz Ahmed (Brock University), Sujit Ghosh (North Carolina State University), and Jamie Stafford (University of Toronto). They also approved a second three-year term for Sastry Pantula (California State University). All four members will serve from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2027.
We are pleased to welcome the new Board members.
Ejaz Ahmed
Ejaz Ahmed is a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics in the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Brock University. Before joining Brock, he was a Professor and Head of Mathematics at the University of Windsor and University of Regina and held a faculty position at the University of Western Ontario. He is also a Senior Advisor to Sigma Analytics (data mining and research) in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Ahmed is is an internationally known scholar and an established researcher. His research interests concentrate on big data, predictive modelling, data science, and statistical machine learning with applications in many walks of life. His research has been supported by a variety of grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada since 1987, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), and other sources throughout his academic career.
Sujit Ghosh
Professor Sujit Kumar Ghosh earned a PhD in Statistics from the University of Connecticut in 1996 and is currently a tenured faculty member at the rank of Full Professor in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has over 22 years of experience in conducting, applying, evaluating and documenting statistical analysis of biomedical and environmental data. Professor Ghosh is actively involved in teaching, supervising and mentoring graduate students at the doctoral and master’s levels. He has supervised more than 35 doctoral graduate students and five postdoctoral fellows, and he has served as a member on numerous other doctoral and master’s-level committees.
In December 2023, he completed a three-year term on CANSSI’s Scientific Advisory Committee.
Jamie Stafford
Jamie Stafford joined the University of Toronto in 1999 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and became a Full Professor in 2005. He has held Visiting Professor positions at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He is a recipient of the Premier’s Research Excellence Award and recently received the Distinguished Service Award from the Statistical Society of Canada for his enthusiastic and dynamic leadership in statistical science across Canada—including serving as Director of the National Program on Complex Data Structures.
His research focus is in asymptotics, symbolic computation and spatio-temporal methods. He recently developed a research program in spatial data analysis with a special emphasis on local smoothing methods applied to non-standard and complex data.
At the University of Toronto, Professor Stafford served as Associate, Acting, and then Interim Chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine. He was Chair of the Department of Statistical Sciences from 2008 to 2018 and led the department through a remarkable period of expansion. He currently holds an appointment in the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
See the full list of current Board members and read their bios.
