Charmaine Dean

Charmaine Dean is vice-president, research and professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. From 2011 to 2017, she served as dean of science at Western University. Previously, she served as founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University and played a major role in establishing that university’s Faculty of Health Sciences in her capacity as the faculty’s associate dean.

Dean received her PhD from the University of Waterloo in 1988. Her research interests lie in the development of methodology for disease mapping, longitudinal studies, the design of clinical trials and spatiotemporal analyses. Much of this work has been motivated by direct applications to important practical problems in biostatistics and ecology.

Dean has made outstanding contributions to professional statistical societies in Canada and internationally. She is former president of the International Biometrics Society, Western North American Region, and the Statistical Society of Canada. She has given 14 years of service to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, including two as chair of the Statistical Sciences Grant Selection Committee and one as chair of the Discovery Accelerator Supplement Committee for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
Among her many honours, Dean was named Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2007 and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010. In 2016, she was elected to the International Statistical Institute. Dean is an active member of several boards including Compute Ontario, the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform, the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy.