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Curriculum Vitae

Research

Statistical Theory & Methods: nonparametric curve estimation, integral transforms, goodness-of-fit tests, time series, spatial processes, nonstationary & locally stationary processes, irregularly spaced data, ratio of means estimation, statistical applications of large deviations

Some applications: change points & bump hunting (e.g. rapid climate change research), age-depth relations (palaeo environmental research), regime change & multivariate dependence among species populations (e.g. palaeo ecology), species count problems (spatial ecology, biodiversity), correlation models for random fields & their applications (e.g. properties of background processes that are decisive of species occurrence and how these are reflected in the shapes of species-area curves - spatial ecology; space-time quantile maps - e.g. statistically estimated precipitation quantile maps showing heavy precipitation zones or drought zones and their changes over time, etc.), statistical issues in large scale environmental monitoring, extreme quantiles & related inference (quantification of risk, risk maps), data mining (e.g. analysis of massive space-time data sets - such as lattice processes to model total column ozone amounts on a global scale; multivariate statistical analysis for large vegetation databases - as for instance uncovering simple structures in very high dimensional species data vectors)

Education

Bethune Collegiate School (Higher Secondary Exam), Presidency college, University of Calcutta (B.Sc., Statistics Honors), Indian Statistical Institute (M. Stat. & postgraduate diploma in Statistical Quality Control & Operations Research), University of Toronto (Ph.D., Statistics)

Jobs

Current: Member of the Scientific Staff (WSL).
Formerly also served as team leader (Kostenstelleleiterin) at the WSL.

Previous: Tenure track Asst. Prof. of Statistics (Cornell, Texas A&M), Visitor (York, UK - Honorary visiting fellow, Mathematics Department, UNC Chapel Hill – visiting assistant professor of Statistics; Stanford – visiting scholar, Statistics Department), Graduate teaching assistant as instructor, marker etc. (Waterloo - Mathematics, Toronto - Statistics), Statistical Consulting Service (Toronto)

Students supervised

Dana Draghicescu (PhD thesis 2002, EPFL, Math.) Associate Professor of Statistics at Hunter College, CUNY, New York, USA; previously, PostDoc, Univ. Chicago.

Patricia Menendez (PhD thesis 2009, ETHZ, Math.) Visiting Professor, Public University of Navarre, Pamplona, Spain; previously, Postdoc at Biometris, Wageningen University, NL.

Hesam Montazeri (Semesterarbeit (Term paper) 2010 & Master thesis 2011, ETHZ, Math.)

Served as reviewer for

American Mathematical Society (AMS), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4 & others), Israel Science Foundation, ProClim (Swiss Academy of Sciences), Research  Grants Council of Hong Kong, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF).

Annals of Forest Science, Annals of Statistics, Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics, Biometrics, Bernoulli, Dendrochronology, Ecological Complexity, Environmetrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Quality Technology, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society - B, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, Journal of Vegetation Science, Mathematical Biosciences, Mathematical Reviews, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, Silva Fennica, Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Student, Forest Snow and Landscape Research (editorial board member)

Teaching experience

-- Switzerland:
* Smoothing and Nonparametric Regression, Lectures, D-MATH, ETH Zürich; Since 2008, once a year, in Fall Terms.
-- UK:
* Statistics II for undergraduates, Lectures (jointly with Gilbert Morrey, York), University of York, Department of Mathematics, (summer 2007)
-- Germany:
* Regression for graduate students, Lectures, University of Konstanz, Germany, Department of Mathematics & Statistics (Winter semesters, 2001 - 2005)
-- USA:
* Undergraduate and graduate Statistics courses, Lectures, Cornell University, ILR school (1988-1990)
* Introductory Statistics & Probability for undergraduates, Lectures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Statistics (1987-1988)
--Canada:
* Introductory Statistics & Probability for undergraduates, Lectures, University of Toronto, Department of Statistics (1982- 1987)
* Various Statistics courses, Teaching assistant, University of Toronto, Department of Statistics (1982-1987)
* Calculus, Teaching assistant, University of Waterloo, Faculty of Mathematics (1981-1982)