SSA Canberra is greatly saddened to advise that Professor Susan Wilson passed away on Monday 16 March 2020. Sue was a strong supporter of the SSA Canberra for her entire professional career, and attended meetings until very recently. In 1997 she presented the Knibbs lecture entitled “Who counts and why? A perspective of the history of women and men in statistics”. She was later a discussant for Oliver Mayo’s Knibbs lecture in 2002, when the topic was “To what extent has Fisher’s research programme been fulfilled In Australia?”

Sue also presented named lectures for the SSA on multiple occasions. She gave the first Moran lecture at the Australian Statistical Conference in Canberra in 2016. Her topic was “The ongoing influence of genetics/omics on advances in statistical science”. Outside of the SSA, Sue was an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS, 1995). She was the President of the International Biometric Society (IBS, 1998-1999). 

Sue provided excellent support to female statisticians in a generally male-dominated profession and also to early career statisticians, encouraging them to attend national conferences as well as local meetings such as Canberra Branch meetings. We will all miss her wisdom and humour.

She is survived by her son Jonathan.

Regards,

Alice Richardson, Conrad Burden, Alan Welsh, Francis Hui