Charmaine Dean

Dean was born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago in 1958 and moved to Canada when she was 19.^[3] She graduated in 1980 with honours in mathematics from the University of Saskatchewan. She did her graduate studies at the University of Waterloo, earning a master's degree in 1984 and a Ph.D. in 1988,^[1] supervised by Jerry Lawless.^[4] Her dissertation was Mixed Poisson Models and Regression Methods for Count Data.^[3][5]

After a year at the University of Calgary,^[3] she joined the faculty at Simon Fraser University in 1989, and became the founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science there at its establishment in 2001.^[1] She served as president of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society in 2002^[6] and of the Statistical Society of Canada in 2007.^[2] She became Burnaby Mountain Research Chair at Simon Fraser before moving to Western as dean of science in 2011.^[1] She stepped down as dean at Western and became vice president for research at Waterloo in 2017.^[7]

Dean was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2007,^[8] and in 2010 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[2] She is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute^[9] and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.^[10]

In 2003, she won the CRM-SSC Prize in Statistics of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques and the Statistical Society of Canada.^[3] In 2012 she won the Trinidad & Tobago Canadian High Commission Award.^[2] She was awarded the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada in 2023.^[11]