Nancy Reid

Nancy Margaret Reid

Reid was the first woman to hold a Canada Research Chair in statistics. As Chair of the “Long Range Plan Steering Committee for Mathematics and Statistics” Reid shaped Canadian national policy on mathematical sciences, leading to the creation of the virtual distributed Canadian Institute for Statistical Sciences (CANSSI) in 2012. She has been the Director of CANSSI since 2015.

Reid studies the foundations and properties of methods of statistical inference in order to discover how inferential statements can accurately and effectively summarize complex data sets.

Reid served as Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Journal of Statistics from 1995 to 1997 She served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1996–1997), and of the Statistical Society of Canada (2004–2005).

Awards and honours Reid won the COPSS Presidents' Award in 1992, the Krieger–Nelson Prize in 1995, the Statistical Society of Canada Gold Medal and Florence Nightingale David Award in 2009, and the Statistical Society of Canada Distinguished Service Award in 2013. She was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (awarded 2014, invested 2015) "for her leadership in the field of statistical inference, which has helped to facilitate sound public policy decision making."

In 2022, Reid won the Guy medal in Gold "for her pioneering work on higher-order approximate inference which provides a foundational basis for optimal information extraction from data, and has wide-ranging impact on the practice of data analysis".

In 1989 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2001. She is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2015 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 2016 a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.