ISI Regional Webinar #7: South American Contributions to Global Statistics

Chair of the ISI Young Statisticians Committee (2023-2025)

Professor at Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Guayaquil, EcuadorChristian Galarza holds a Doctorate and a Master's in Statistics from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. He has also been a Research Scholar at the University of Connecticut (UCONN), USA. He is a professor and researcher at ESPOL in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He is the third Ecuadorian elected as an International Statistical Institute (ISI) member.He was recognized with the ISI Young Ambassador Award for the International Biometrics Society (IBC Riga 2020), World Bank Trust Fund Awardee (WSC Kuala Lumpur 2019), the ISI Jan Tinbergen Award (WSC Marrakech 2017), and the IASI Award for Excellence (WSC Rio 2015).His research focuses on developing statistical models for complex data and implementing them in R libraries. His expertise includes truncated multivariate moments, quantile regression, and censored models.

Nancy Lopes Garcia is a renowned statistician and researcher with an outstanding academic and administrative career. She earned her Bachelor's in Statistics from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (1985), an MSc in Mathematics from the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (1988), and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1993). Since 1987, she has been a key member of UNICAMP’s Statistics Department, becoming a full professor in 2002.

Her research focuses on probability and spatial stochastic processes, including perfect simulation, long-memory chains, percolation, and spatial point processes. In addition to her scholarly work, Nancy has held influential administrative roles at UNICAMP and served on national scientific bodies such as CAPES, CNPq, and the Brazilian Society of Mathematics.

Mauricio Castro is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he has worked since 2017. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at Universidad de Concepción after earning his Ph.D. in Statistics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 2008. His research focuses on statistical modeling for complex datasets, including spatial, longitudinal, and temporal models applied to economics, biology, and psychology. He has extensively studied statistical learning techniques for clinical trials in HIV research, addressing challenges like skewness, missing data, and measurement errors. He has also held leadership roles, including Faculty Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies (2020-2023) and President of the Chilean Statistical Society (2016-2019).

Professor Castro actively contributes to Ph.D., Master's, and undergraduate programs and collaborates with researchers worldwide. He has presented at international conferences and published in top statistical journals such as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrics, and Statistics in Medicine. He serves as an Associate Editor for Sankhya Series A and the Chilean Journal of Statistics. As Principal Investigator, he has led multiple research projects funded by FONDECYT and other international agencies, with affiliations at institutions like the Center for Research in Mathematical Engineering and the Center for Mathematical Modelling.

Bachelor degree in Mathematics, Postgraduate, M.Sc. and PhD in Statistics. My research involves theoretical and software developments for geostatistical analysis, complex networks and regression models of spatial, spatio-temporal and functional data. Many of these models and tools have been inspired and in consequence applied to in agriculture, environment, meteorology, epidemiology, planning, medicine, among many others.