Guest Instructors

   Lu Wang, MA (Management Science)

Lu Wang is a PhD candidate the Department of Geography, York University, and an invited instructor on the use and application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Her research interests include marketing, consumer behaviour, ethnicity, and immigration; methodological interests cover spatial statistics, geovisualization of census data, survey data and travel data, GIS-aided survey design, and discrete choice models. Her recent research on consumption and ethnicity will appear in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services. She is currently also the course director of GEOG 3140: Retailing, Shopping, Society and Space, 2003-2004.

Staff and Associates

  Oren Amitay, MA:

Oren Amitay is a consultant with the Statistical Consulting Service and a doctoral candidate in Psychology at York University.

 

Colleen Bowers, MA

Colleen is a new consultant with the Statistical Consulting Service and a doctoral candidate in Clinical-Developmental Psychology at York. Her training comes from: courses and theses completed at Wilfrid Laurier University (B.A.) and York (M.A.), tutoring students individually, and being a teaching assistant for several undergraduate statistics courses, inlcuding the honours thesis course (4170). Currently she is the research coordinator of a program- evaluation project and her interests include changes in adolescence, family dynamics, and psychological well-being. Colleen is proficient in SPSS and although she is most comfortable with ANOVA and (Logistic) Regression, her skills are not limited to these procedures.

  Professor Robert Cribbie [Home Page]

Robert Cribbie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at York University and an Associate Coordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service. He received his Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Manitoba. His research interests include multiple comparison procedures, robust ANOVA strategies, and structural equation modeling.

 

  Dan Denis, MA[Home Page]

Dan earned his B.A. at Laurentian University, his M.A. at York University, and is currently completing his doctoral dissertation at York University. His interests include the history and development of multivariate statistical methods, null hypothesis significance testing, and the history and philosophy of science.

Lisa Fiksenbaum, MA

Lisa Fiksenbaum is a doctoral candidate in Social/Personality Psychology at York University. She also received her BA and MA from York. Her training and experience in statistics includes a Teaching Assistantship for the honours thesis course (Psych 4170) and she has been involved in several research projects, both within the university and the private sector. Her research interests include organizational issues, work-family relationships, stress and coping. Ms. Fiksenbaum is proficient in SPSS, and regularly consults with graduate and undergraduate students for SCS.

Laura Friedlander

Laura is currently an M.A. student in Clinical-Developmental Psychology at York University and a new consultant with the Statistical Consulting Service. Her experience and training in statistics come from undergraduate (BSc at U of Western Ontario) and graduate courses, tutoring students, being a teaching assistant for Intro to Statistics, and her own research work. Her main research interests include: social support and adjustment to university, peer and dating relationships, and the prevention of dating violence among adolescents. She is quite skilled at using SPSS and will be answering statistical questions from honours thesis students.

Professor  John Fox: [Home Page]

John Fox is Professor of Sociology at McMaster and the founding Coordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service. He is currently an Associate Co-ordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service. He teaches regularly at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research in Ann Arbor, and is the author of Applied Regression Analysis, Linear Models, and Related Methods (Sage, 1997) and An R and S-PLUS Companion to Applied Regression (Sage, 2002), among other works. Professor Fox holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

 

  Professor Bryn Greer-Wootten [Home page], [Faculty profile]

Bryn Greer-Wootten is Professor Emeritus in Environmental Studies and the Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, and an Associate Coordinator with the Statistical Consulting Service. His research interests are in the area of environmental policy and planning. In particular, they include community responses to high-level nuclear waste facility siting, local conflicts in provincial waste management policies, scientific and elite discourse in global climate change policy formulation, and cross-cultural representations of folk narratives on the environment.
 

Professor  Michael Friendly: [Home Page]

Michael Friendly received his doctorate in Psychology from Princeton University, specializing in Psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology. He is a Professor of Psychology at York and the current Coordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service. In addition to his research interests in psychology, Professor Friendly has broad experience in data analysis, statistics and computer applications. He is the author of SAS for Statistical Graphics, 1st Edition and Visualizing Categorical Data, both published by SAS Institute, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. His recent work includes the development of graphical methods for categorical data, and the history of statistical graphics. He is the founder of Les Chevaliers des Album de Statistique Graphique. See his home page for more information.

 

  Yong Ge, Ph D

Yong Ge received her doctorate in Geographical Information Sciences (GIS) and Cartography from Chinese Academy of Sciences, China in 2001. Dr. Yong Ge has been working at the Geomatics Research Lab, York University, as Postdoctoral Fellow since February 2003. She has over 10 years of experience in GIS and Remote Sensing fields. Her research interest includes the uncertainty in geographical information and its visualization, methods of Spatial Data Handling: Multifractal, Neural Networks, Knowledge-based Methods. She has published over 20 papers in journals and conferences and conducted a number of national research projects supported by Chinese National Foundation of Science and Ministry of Science and Technology.

  Ernest Kwan, MA

Ernest is a graduate student of Psychology. He received his BA from York and his MA from the University of North Carolina. Ernest studies statistical methodologies used in Psychology and he has a strong interest in statistical graphics and data visualization.

 

  Gigi Luk, MA

Gigi Luk received both her BA and MA in Psychology from York University and is currently a PhD candidate. Ms. Luk started to use SAS as a research tool in her undergraduate years and her research interests focus on the influence of bilingualism on cognitive development in young children. The major statistical methods she uses are ANOVA, regression and, occasionally, principal component analysis. Ms. Luk is also a Teaching Assistant in Psychology statistics courses at the elementary and intermediate levels.

 

Professor  Georges Monette : [Home Page]

Georges Monette is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at York and the past Coordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service. Most of his research has been in the mathematical foundations of statistical inference. His recent interest is the geometric representation of statistical concepts. He has worked in a number of applied areas, including pay equity and the statistical analysis of salary structures.  He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Toronto.

 John Pollard, MA

John Pollard is a Project Manager at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at York University where he has worked since 1986. As well as managing survey research projects at the Institute and editing ISR's Newsletter, Mr. Pollard consults with graduate students, York faculty, and external clients on various aspects of survey research, including questionnaire design and data collection methods. He holds a BA, with a concentration in French, from the University of Toronto, an Honours BA and an MA in Sociology from York. His thesis examined the impact of religious affiliation and religious practices on attitudes toward euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Qian Tong, MA

Qian Tong is a PhD candidate in Statistics at York University. She received her BA from Peking University and her MAS from Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has a strong interest in survival data analysis, and computational methods, regression analysis, categorical data, mixed models, generalized linear models, computational statistics and statistical inference.

Professor  Peggy Ng , Ph.D.: [Home Page]

Peggy Ng received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of Toronto. She has been involved in the design and analysis of medical research at the University of Toronto and has recently published with research scientists from the Canadian Wildlife Services. Dr. Ng is an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at York University. She is the biostatistician with York's Behavioural Science Research Group on Health Studies and is a consultant with the Statistical Consulting Service and York's Computing, Communications and Instructional Services.

 

 David Northrup, MA

David Northrup is Associate Director at ISR and is responsible for the design and management of major surveys at the Institute. He has over 20 years of experience in questionnaire design and data collection. His research interests include survey methodology, election studies, public policy, and government policy on tobacco control. Mr. Northrup holds an MA and he teaches survey research methods at York University.

 

  Mirka Ondrack , MSc:

Mirka Ondrack received her Masters degree in Physics from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic and spent two years studying industrial engineering at the University of Toronto. She has held the position of Programmer/Analyst at ISR since 1971. Ms. Ondrack is currently a consultant with the Statistical Consulting Service and also does custom programming and data analysis. She has been teaching courses on SAS and SPSS since 1981.

Mirka consults on Statistical computing using SPSS and SAS; data screening and statistical graphics; regression, ANOVA and other linear models; factor analysis, PCA.

 

 Professor Michael Ornstein:

Michael Ornstein is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Social Research, where he is responsible for research methodology. After completing an undergraduate degree in physics, Ornstein obtained his doctorate in the Department of Social Relations at the Johns Hopkins University.  His "Trend Report on Survey Research" appears as a recent issue (Vol 46:4) of Current Sociology, a journal of the International Sociological Association, and his "Politics and Ideology in Canada:  Elite and Public Opinion in the Transformation of a Welfare State" and his "Public Opinion in the Transformation of a Welfare State," co-authored with H. Michael Stevenson, will appear from McGill-Queen's University Press in Spring 1999.  Ornstein's social research is in political sociology and in quantitative analysis of material inequality.  His methodological interests are in the areas of questionnaire design and the analysis of social survey data.

 

Professor  Peter Peskun:

Peter Peskun received his doctorate in Statistics from the University of Toronto. He is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at York and is an Associate Consultant with the Statistical Consulting Service. His research interests include sample survey design, random number generation, confidence interval estimation for samples from discrete distributions, and goodness-of-fit statistics for testing uniformity.

 

 Dr. Darla Rhyne:

Darla Rhyne, Research Associate at ISR, was educated at the University of Toronto in Anthropology and Sociology and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto. Dr. Rhyne's research areas include community health, education, ethnic studies, and quality of life. She has over 20 years of experience in the analysis of qualitative data from community field work, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observation.

 

 Nikolai Slobodianik

Nikolai Slobodianik is a Ph.D. student in Applied Statistics, York University. His current research is in statistical analysis of stem cell development in collaboration with a group of biologists from the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. He has a strong interest in longitudinal data analysis, generalized linear models and Bayesian networks.
 

 Professor Barry Smith[Home Page]

Barry Smith is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and an Associate Co-ordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service. His principal research interests include model-based clustering, nonparametric regression, exploratory data analysis and econometrics.

 

  Tao Sun:

Tao Sun is a Ph.D. student of Mathematics and Statistics at York University. She received her M.A. in Applied Statistics from York in 2002. Her current research is on stochastical simulation of weather variables. Her other interests include (generalized) linear models and regression, clinical trials, categorical data analysis, and statistical computation. She is comfortable working with SAS and R/S+.
 

 Professor Augustine Wong [Home Page]

Augustine Wong is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at York and an Associate Consultant with the Statistical Consulting Service. His research interests include statistical inference, survival data analysis, and computational methods, econometrics and computational finance.

He will be available for consultation in areas of his expertise in Winter/Spring 2003.

 

 Professor Yuehua (Amy) Wu [Home page]

Yuehua (Amy) Wu received her doctorate in Mathematics/Statistics from University of Pittsburgh. She is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at York and the current Director of the Statistics section in the department of Mathematics and Statistics. Her research interests include robust statistics, multivariate analysis, model selection, signal detection, etc.

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