Maths Intro | Toss a Coin | Flexible Hours | Multidimensional Statistician | SARS Equation

A Multidimensional Statistician
By Yihong 'Eugene' Lai

___It’s 6.30 am in Sydney, Australia. While most Australians are deep in slumber, Professor Matt Wand is already awake and in his office at the University of New South Wales. Being a health conscious individual he is, Professor Wand wakes at 5am daily for light exercise.

___Professor Wand values his family greatly and does not work on weekends. He spends them relaxing with his wife and two young children, often swimming in the Coogee beach area. The freedom of a bohemian lifestyle, coupled with the fact that statistics "stimulates the mind", is what most entices Professor Wand to this job.

___Statistics is the mathematics of collection, organization, and interpretation of numerical data. Its relevance in today’s society is extensive, with applications including computational biology and finance. There is significant growth in areas such as Bio-informatics, and statisticians like Professor Wand are in high demand. Although Professor Wand could make more money teaching in a business school, he says that it would be more inflexible and harder to teach: “The students don’t really care about statistics since they are pursuing a business degree in the end”. It is easy to see his passion for statistics shine through.

___Professor Wand has always been interested in Mathematics, and after taking some first-year courses at university, he found that Statistics was his favourite area. This passion led him to complete his bachelors degree in Mathematics in 1986 at the University of Wollongong and a PhD in 1989 at the Australian National University in Canberra. His main research interests include semi-parametric regression modelling, computational biology, and statistics in environmental health. The latter led to him teach at the Harvard University School of Public Health in USA from 1997 to 2002. Professor Wand considers this time as the highlight of his career. He received a plaque of commendation for his outstanding services to the school. Professor Wand returned to UNSW to teach statistics in 2003.

___Today Professor Wand makes the most of his early start, putting three hours effort into statistical problems and modelling. Research remains the main focus of his career. During sabbatical leave in the second half of this year, he will collaborate with a group of scientists partially funded by the Australian Research Council. Their project on statistics and flow cytometry could potentially enable the classification of antibodies based on their binding to the surface of blood cells. This is essential for progress in Immunology and clinical medicine. Professor Wand has based two books on his research; Kernel Smoothing and Semi parametric Regression, as well as numerous scientific papers. In fact, from 1993-2001, he was amongst the most cited mathematicians in Australian publications!

___Outside his research interests, Professor Wand wracks his brains to put together lectures and exercises for his students. Today, the remainder of his morning is spent on exercises for the Higher Theory of Statistics course he teaches at UNSW, for which he is the sole lecturer. Professor Wand has recently conducted a survey of his students to monitor the quality of his lectures. Being the statistician that he is, he has meticulously translated the compiled data into histograms for every question. It was no surprise that comments are generally positive, though Professor Wand was much more interested in the negative comments. With a smile, he pointed to them and remarked “these students clearly don’t like me”.

___After the 2pm lecture today, Professor Wand has a student consultation period. Here, students can approach him for personal tutoring. Today, Professor Wand helps out a student called Tim with general questions about statistics and specific exercise questions.

___Before the end of the day, Professor Wand divulges his recipe for success to aspiring statistics students: “The successful student must be very time-efficient, organised, and also good at computing". Looking at his orderly and spacious office, silent except for the quiet humming of the computer that processes all his thoughts and statistical models, it is easy to see why Professor Wand has become so successful in this field.

Maths Intro | Toss a Coin | Flexible Hours | Multidimensional Statistician | SARS Equation