Michael Evans is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1977 and has been employed there ever since with leaves spent at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, has served as an Associate Editor of JASA Theory and Methods 1991-2005, an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Statistics 1999-2006, 2017-present, an Associate Editor of the journal Bayesian Analysis 2005-2015 and an Editor 2015-present and is a subject matter Editor for the online journal FACETS. He served as President of the Statistical Society of Canada 2013-2014. His research has been concerned with multivariate statistical methodology, computational statistics, and the foundations of statistics. A current focus of research is the development of a theory of inference based upon an explicit definition of how to measure statistical evidence and the development of tools to deal with criticisms of statistical methodology associated with its inherent subjectivity. He has authored, or coauthored, numerous research papers as well as the books Approximating Integrals via Monte Carlo and Deterministic Methods (with T. Swartz) published by Oxford in 2000, Probability and Statistics: The Science of Uncertainty (with J. Rosenthal) published by W.H. Freeman in 2004 and 2010 and Measuring Statistical Evidence Using Relative Belief published by CRC Press/ Chapman and Hall in 2015.

Dr. Jiahua Chen received his Master’s degree from the Institute of System’s Science in Academia Sinica in Jan 1985 under the supervision of Professor Ping Cheng, and Ph. D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in July 1990 under the supervision of Professor Jeff Wu.

Dr. Jiahua Chen joined the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo as a visiting scholar in the year 1989, accepted an assistant professorship in 1991, and was dutifully promoted to associate and full professor during the period until the end of 2006. He then joined the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia as Canada Research Chair, Tier I from Jan 2007 until Dec 2020 from which point he remains as a full professor. He worked on problems in the design of experiment, but his research interest quickly extends broadly to include Finite Mixture Models, Empirical Likelihood, Survey Methodology, and many others. He is proud of his result on the periodicity of the minimum aberration fractional factorial designs, the groundbreaking EM-test for the order of finite mixture models, the challenging results on the nearest neighbor imputation in sampling data analysis, the pioneering work of introducing the empirical likelihood to sampling problems, as well as the invention of extended Bayesian information criterion for large model spaces.

Dr. Jiahua Chen is an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association. He is the recipient of the CRM-SSC Prize in Statistics for his outstanding contributions to the statistical sciences. This prestigious award, jointly sponsored by the Statistical Society of Canada(SSC) and the Centre de recherches mathématiques de Montréal (CRM), is given each year to a Canadian statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the discipline during the recipient’s first 15 years after earning a doctorate. He received the Gold Medal, the top prize of the Statistical Society of Canada in 2014, the International Chinese Statistical Association distinguished achievement award in 2016.