Ayesha Ali

Ali completed her PhD in Statistics at the University of Washington in 2002, after which she taught at the National University of Singapore.  She moved to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph in 2006, where she is now a Professor of Statistics and the Director of the Master of Data Science program. Her research area is graphical Markov models and involves studying complex, high dimensional and highly structured systems, though the applications domains are quite diverse. She first considers the underlying data generating mechanism of her data and then relates it to an appropriate graph. Specific research problems often lie in structure learning, variable selection, classification and/or regularization.  Recent application domains involve developing crop land suitability projections for Canada, modelling gut microbiome interactions, and exploiting structure among predictors when performing variable selection for undirected graphs.