Influential SMP academic honoured with Academy Fellowship

27 May 2015

One of the most highly cited researchers in the world, The University of Queensland’s Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow Professor GeoffMcLachlan has received a further prestigious honour.

Professor McLachlan is one of five UQ researchers recognised with a Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science out of the 21 fellowships awarded nationally.

The prestigious fellowships are given to a select group of scientists each year, recognising leading and innovative research.

Professor McLachlan from UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics is a pioneer in the field of mixture models, which play a central role in statistical science.

His work can be applied to many fields, including medical statistics, allowing for a model-based approach to the analysis and clustering of heterogeneous data.

UQ Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Peter Høj said UQ had more 2015 Fellows than any other institution.
"They are thought leaders in the scientific community and their work delivers results that benefit society," he said.

Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics Professor Joseph Grotowski congratulated Professor McLachlan on the prestigious honour

"This is a further recognition of the significance of Geoff’s work and a tribute to his standing in the national and international scientific community," he said.

Professor McLachlan said he was humbled by the recognition of his peers.

Professor McLachlan’s current research projects in statistics are in the related fields of classification, cluster and discriminant analyses, image analysis, machine learning, neural networks, and pattern recognition, and in the field of statistical inference.

The focus in the field of statistical inference has been on the theory and applications of finite mixture models and on estimation via the EM algorithm.

A common theme of his research in these fields has been statistical computation, with particular attention being given to the computational aspects of the statistical methodology. This computational theme extends to ProfessorMcLachlan's more recent interests in the field of data mining.

He is also actively involved in research in the field of medical statistics and, more recently, in the statistical analysis of microarray gene expression data.

Professor McLachlan received his PhD in 1973 and his Doctorate of Science in 1994, both from UQ.

As an Institute for Scientific Information Highly Cited Author, he is part of an elite club of less than 0.5 percent of all published researchers in the world and is recognised as one of the 250 top authors in his field.

He has a personal chair in statistics in UQ's School of Mathematics and Physics and has published six monographs, 20 book chapters and more than 140 articles in peer-reviewed literature.

In December 2010, Professor McLachlan was awarded the Statistical Society of Australia's highest honour - the Pitman Medal - to recognise his "outstanding achievement in, and contribution to, the discipline of statistics".

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