W. John Braun, Professor, MDS Okanagan (On Leave)
"Over the years, I have found no truer statement than that of John Tukey which I paraphrase here: 'The best thing about being a data scientist is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.'"
W. John Braun got his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Western Ontario in 1992. Since then, he has held positions at a number of universities, including Western for 14 years where he attained the rank of Full Professor and was Chair of the Statistics Graduate Program for 5 years. In 2014, he took the opportunity to become Head of Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics at UBC's Okanagan campus.
He was Deputy Director of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute and is now Director of the UBCO site for the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery. Braun's research in statistics is motivated by scientific problems, coming from psychology, biology, medicine, engineering and physics. His methodological contributions are concerned with computational issues around uncertainty quantification and smoothing techniques. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and two books in the area of computational statistics.