Emeritus Professor
Helen MacGillivray

Biography

Helen MacGillivray is immediate Past President of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), and was only the second female, and only the second Australian, to hold this presidency in ISI’s 135 year history. She was one of the first Australian Senior Learning and Teaching Fellows, and the first female President and first female Honorary Life Member of the Statistical Society of Australia. Helen was a Professor in Statistics at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and is now a QUT Adjunct Professor. She is Editor of Teaching Statistics, lead Editor of a special issue on Teaching Data Science and Statistics, a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, inaugural Chair of the UN Global Network of Institutions for Statistical Training, and a past President of the International Association for Statistical Education. Her extensive work in teaching and curricula design across multiple disciplines, class sizes and educational levels received support through national awards and significant grants. She has published widely (including textbooks, book chapters, keynote, refereed papers, invited papers and articles), on authentic learning, teaching and assessment in statistics and quantitative learning support as well as statistical research interests in distributional properties and families and their applications. Her methodological research papers have been widely read and cited in theoretical and applied contexts. She established, and was joint chair and editor of, the Australian Conferences on Teaching Statistics since 2008, and has been a member of the organising or editorial committees for many conferences, including International Conferences on Teaching Statistics, ISI World Statistics Conferences, Australian Statistics Conferences, Southern Hemisphere Conferences on Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics, and Australasian Engineering Education Conferences. Helen has chaired reviews of university departments and centres across Australia and internationally, and has worked as a consultant on teaching statistics in Australian universities and with the Royal Statistical Society. Helen’s diverse and extensive leadership roles and achievements in learning and teaching over many years include founding and directing QUT’s Maths Access Centre (which eventually became incorporated in STIMulate), Symposia in Statistical Thinking for postgraduates across disciplines, a mentored developmental program in learning how to teach university statistics and mathematics, MathX (an extension program for talented school students), and Maths Futures (a showcase of careers from young graduates in the workplace). Helen has also played key roles over many years in statistics and mathematics school education in curriculum, professional development, resources and assessment.