Welcome Francis, welcome back Alice!

A big welcome to Francis Hui, who has started a PhD this year, co-supervised by Scott Foster at CSIRO, Hobart.  Francis will be extending finite mixture modellimg methods for the analysis of multi-species data in ecology.  This modelling approach has a lot of potential, allowing us to better estimate and understand cross-species patterns in environmental response.

And welcome back to Alice, back from maternity leave.  She will be extending the functionality of the mvabund package (for hypothesis testing of multivariate abundance data in ecology), and evaluating these tools via computationally intensive simulations.  Great to have you back on board, Alice!

Student prizes at IBS conference - congrats to Eve and Ian!

The International Biometrics Society (Australasian region) conference was held at Kiama in December 2011, "Biometrics at the Blowholes".  A huge congrats to Eve Slavich, who won the prize for best student talk (and at her first conference!), and to Ian Renner, who got the runners-up prize.  Wow, nice one guys!

Here's a picture of a proud David with the two prize-winners...