There was a strong School presence at the 32nd edition of the International Workshop on Statistical Modelling 2017 (IWSM) which was held in Groningen (Netherlands) from Sunday 2nd to Friday 7th July, hosted by the University of Groningen. Four of Prof Dirk Husmeier’s PhD students, Diana Giurghita, Mihaela Paun, Alan Lazarus and Elaine Ferguson, gave talks and two other students, Michela Pasetto and Umberto Noe, had a joint poster.

There was also a strong presence at the Royal Statistical Society 2017 annual conference, which was held in Glasgow from Monday 4th to Thursday 7th September. Prof Adrian Bowman gave the opening plenary talk, on the title "Surfaces, Shapes and Anatomy" and Prof Dirk Husmeier gave a talk entitled "Statistical inference of drivers of collective cell movement". PhD students Alan Lazarus, Diana Giurghita and Mihaela Paun, and research assistant Dr Mu Niu also gave talks while PhD students Michela Pasetto and Umberto Noe presented a joint poster.

Not only did Prof Adrian Bowman give the opening plenary talk but also in the evening, he was to be found performing stand-up comedy in the Buff Club downtown. (True!). This was part of a “144” event organised by the President of the RSS – can 1 person say something interesting and entertaining in a maximum of 4 minutes and with a maximum of 4 slides? (Actually, Adrian didn’t have any slides.)

The joint meeting of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society and Societat Catalana de Matemàtiques was held between Wednesday 27th and Friday 29th September at the ICMS in Edinburgh. Prof Stuart White was one of the organisers, with a plenary lecture given by Prof Xiaoyu Luo. Mini-symposium talks were also given by Profs Tara Brendle, Ken Brown and Ian Strachan and Drs Andy Baker, Jamie Gabe, Peter Stewart, Christian Voigt, Stephen Watson and Joachim Zacharias.

Dr Andy Baker gave an invited talk at The Transatlantic Transchromatic Homotopy Theory Conference which took place between Tuesday 6th and Friday 9th June in Regensburg. The talk was entitled "Finitely generated commutative S-algebras".

Dr Alex Bartel was a keynote speaker at the Young Researchers in Mathematics 2017 (YRM), a graduate student conference, which was hosted by the University of Kent and took place between Tuesday 1st and Friday 4th August. Alex stayed on after the conference to carry out some further research with one of his collaborators, Prof Hendrik Lenstra, who was also a keynote speaker at the conference.

Dr Brendan Owens visited University of Ljubljana in May to give a seminar talk and collaborate with Josh Greene (Boston College) and Sašo Strle (Ljubljana).

In June of this year, in collaboration with Honorary Research Fellow Prof. Liam Watson, Brendan organised "Low-dimensional topology on Skye", a weeklong workshop with 40 participants.

Dr Tereza Neocleous gave a talk at the Statistics Showcase event in London on Friday 30th June, organised by the Young Statisticians Section of the Royal Statistical Society. Tereza spoke about the role of an academic statistician and the opportunities and challenges for those currently considering this career path.

Then, on Wednesday 5th July, Tereza visited the Alessandro Bertinaria Anti-doping and Toxicology Lab near Turin, Italy, to discuss collaborative research projects in forensic statistics. The photo below was taken in the forensic DNA analysis lab.

On Friday 29th September Tereza gave a talk on forensic statistics to pupils at Springburn Academy, as part of European Researchers Night (Exploration 2017). The talk was followed by an interactive problem solving activity.

Dr Peter Stewart attended the UK Fluids Network Special Interest Group in Fluid Mechanics of the eye event in Oxford from Monday 25th to Tuesday 26th September.

First published: 11 October 2017

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