# One More Sleep

The Annual Meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada officially opens tomorrow – Sunday June 3, 2012. This year the meeting takes place at the University of Guelph which means I don’t have far to go to join in on the fun. I’m very much looking forward to seeing some familiar faces, chatting with colleagues, and discovering what everyone has been up to over the past year.

I’m also excited because several of my students will be presenting their posters during one of the two poster sessions. These include Kathleen Ryan, an MSc student in the Department of Integrative Biology, Matt Rueffer, a recent graduate and soon to be grad student in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and Justin Angevaare, an undergrad student in the School of Environmental Science. Each of them have been working their collective butts off over the past year on their respective projects – all of which are sponsored all or in part by the Saugeen Ojibway First Nations:

• Kat developing and implementing the sampling design for her field work to investigate the distribution and abundance of larval lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) in Stokes Bay, identifying by hand each and every larvae caught, and analyzing and interpreting the findings;
• Matt finishing his undergraduate degree, while developing spatial and temporal models to assess the trends in Catch-Per-Unit-Effort (CPUE) over the past 30 or so odd years;
• Justin taking a set of several difficult mathematics and statistics courses, learning $LaTeX$, R, and even some C, not to mention writing the code to run a simulation study to assess the effects of aggregating harvest events over different temporal scales – a first step in studying the utility of CPUE variance in population models – and summarize the results in a meaningful manner.

I’m proud of all of them, and I’m happy that they are taking part in this year’s meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada. If you are on campus on Tuesday June 5, around 1pm, drop by the Atrium to check out these and all of the rest of the posters.