A love affair with numbers

VANMEURSA — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:27:24 +0000

Dating back to the 17th century, mathematical methods of statistics focus and quantify scientific thinking by guiding collection of data, then its analysis, interpretation and presentation. Recognising the importance of statistics to enhance and add rigour to our research, as well as validating its results, we recently engaged Dr Sama Low Choy from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to provide strategic statistical support including training across our portfolio and to build capacity in this unique field.

Sama’s no stranger to numbers and mathematics. Her first vivid memory of the significance of numbers was realised when her parents picked her up from school, and presented her with two babies: a new twin brother and sister. As a teenager, she was fascinated by the revelation that no one had managed to model biodiversity across the whole planet.

It was during her undergraduate studies at the University of Queensland that Sama first fell in love with statistics. In her second year, Sama says Dr Chant from Psychology revealed the elegance of least squares underlying ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance) and linear models. Sama’s interest in statistical problem-solving was piqued by Dr Pollett’s ability to lecture from his head on exploding processes plus a project on tessellations. She has also been inspired through her work with statisticians at Bond University and QUT, and with ecologists and environmental scientists across government and academia.

Sama’s role at the CRC is a full-time position within project CRC90143. She works with Project Leader, Professor Kerrie Mengersen (also at QUT).

The three main aims of her project are to:

provide statistical project support within the CRC
ensure statistical quality, and
undertake statistical research relevant to biosecurity.

Initially, Sama will be involved in biosecurity statistical surveillance systems. To help our researchers and students gain a better understanding of how statistics can complement their research outcomes, Sama will be presenting a workshop called ‘Stats with Sama’ at the upcoming 2009 Science Exchange.

Sama will also work with the CRC to assess strategic statistical needs for project support and for ensuring quality across the CRC portfolio. This is balanced by collaborative research projects on expert elicitation in ecology, developing new statistical methodology underlying elicitation, and Bayesian statistical design, methods and application.

Sama says she was attracted to this position for a number of reasons. Firstly, she sees plant biosecurity as an emerging discipline, as is the statistical methodology required to support it. In particular, she believes Bayesian approaches can be very useful in new areas of investigation since it encourages assessment of competing models that fit the observed data (rather than how surprising the data is under the fitted model).

Sama understands that expert knowledge is a valuable input to many biosecurity problems, ranging from risk assessments to surveillance design. As such, she recognises biosecurity provides fertile ground and opportunity for innovative statistical application and research. Another key attraction for her was the strong interest and support in harnessing statistics in many areas of the organisation.
Finally, Sama says the position provides an important mix of application of statistics to real problems, working within an organisation with a long-term view of building capacity and quality, as well as time to maintain her expertise in cutting edge statistics via related research on methodology.

Sama’s expertise is already providing value across our portfolio and we warmly welcome her to the CRC.

Want to know more about Sama?

See her staff profile.

CRC for Plant Biosecurity - Sama Low Choy

A love affair with numbers