Charmaine B. Dean (born 1958) is a statistician from

Trinidad Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The island lies off the northeastern coast of Venezuela and sits on the continental shelf of South America. It is often referred to as the southernmos ...

. She is the vice president for research at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

, a professor of statistical and actuarial sciences at both Waterloo and Western University, the former president of the Western North American Region of the

International Biometric Society The International Biometric Society (IBS) is an international professional and academic society promoting the development and application of statistical and mathematical theory and methods in the biosciences, including biostatistics. It sponsors ...

, the former President of the Statistical Society of Canada. Her research interests include

longitudinal studies A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over short or long periods of time (i.e., uses longitudinal data). It is often a type of obs ...

survival analysis Survival analysis is a branch of statistics for analyzing the expected duration of time until one event occurs, such as death in biological organisms and failure in mechanical systems. This topic is called reliability theory or reliability analysi ...

, spatiotemporal data,

heart surgery Cardiac surgery, or cardiovascular surgery, is surgery on the heart or great vessels performed by cardiac surgeons. It is often used to treat complications of ischemic heart disease (for example, with coronary artery bypass grafting); to corr ...

, and

wildfire A wildfire, forest fire, bushfire, wildland fire or rural fire is an unplanned, uncontrolled and unpredictable fire in an area of combustible vegetation. Depending on the type of vegetation present, a wildfire may be more specifically identi ...

Education and career

Dean was born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago in 1958 and moved to Canada when she was 19. She graduated in 1980 with honours in mathematics from the

University of Saskatchewan A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...

. She did her graduate studies at the

, earning a master's degree in 1984 and a Ph.D. in 1988, supervised by Jerry Lawless. Her dissertation was ''Mixed Poisson Models and Regression Methods for Count Data''. After a year at the

University of Calgary The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...

, she joined the faculty at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located ...

in 1989, and became the founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science there at its establishment in 2001. She served as president of th
Western North American Region
of the

in 2002 and of the

Statistical Society of Canada The Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) (french: Société statistique du Canada) is a professional organization whose mission is to promote the use and development of statistics and probability. Its objectives are * to make the general public aw ...

in 2007. She became Burnaby Mountain Research Chair at Simon Fraser before moving to Western as dean of science in 2011. She stepped down as dean at Western and became vice president for research at Waterloo in 2017.

Recognition

Dean was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

in 2007, and in 2010 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and a Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

. In 2003, she won the CRM-SSC Prize in Statistics of the

Centre de Recherches Mathématiques The Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM) is the first mathematical research institute in Canada, located at the Université de Montréal. The CRM has ten research laboratories, one in each of: mathematical analysis, number theory and symbol ...

and the Statistical Society of Canada. In 2012 she won the Trinidad & Tobago Canadian High Commission Award.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dean, Charmaine 1958 births Living people Canadian statisticians Women statisticians Trinidad and Tobago academics University of Saskatchewan alumni Academic staff of the University of Calgary Academic staff of Simon Fraser University Academic staff of the University of Western Ontario Academic staff of the University of Waterloo Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Presidents of the Statistical Society of Canada People from San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago