Rachel Fewster: Recipient of NZSA Campbell Award 2018

Abstract

The origins of Rachel Fewster’s tenure in The Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland can be traced back to the 1997 meeting of the Australasian Region of the International Biometrics Society, held at Paradise Cove in South Australia. It was there that some newly converted Bayesians (Renate Meyer and Russell Millar) met a keen young PhD student from the University of St Andrews. She had an intense enthusiasm for statistics, ecology and the kind of outdoors opportunities available down-under.A bit of snooping around upon their return to Auckland showed that this was no ordinary PhD student. By 1999 a post-doc had been offered and accepted, and the rest as they say, is history. Indeed, history was made in August of this year when Rachel was promoted to full Professor, the first woman to have achieved this milestone since the establishment of the department in the early 1990s. Rachel has made outstanding contributions in research, statistical education and has had a major impact on the use and promotion of statistics in New Zealand and internationally. In 2018, she received the NZSA Campbell Award. Rachel has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers during her 20-year career, including 14 papers in the major statistical journals Biometrics, Biometrika, Statistical Science, and J. Multivariate Analysis, numerous papers in high-ranking journals in ecology and genetics, and a total of 28 publications in journals ranked A*/A. She has led three Marsden grants and one MBIE grant, all comprising novel statistical research with direct relevance to conservation in NZ, totalling $1.5M. She has been a keynote speaker at seven international conferences in the last 7 years. She has also supervised about 15 PhD students, both in statistics and biology, who have gone on to achieve prestigious awards and employment, including two Rutherford Discovery Fellowships, one Prime Minister’s Emerging Scientist award, 11 current academic appointments worldwide, and numerous conference prizes. For biology PhDs in particular, the injection of novel statistical content has not only given the students a competitive edge in gaining awards and employment, but has also created firm interdisciplinary links and raised the profile of statistics among researchers in biological sciences.