meet the SIG Leads

Alyssa is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson). She is the director of the Psychology and Statistics Education Research (PASER) lab, where her research group examines topics such as statistics attitudes, statistics anxiety, and methods for improving statistics education in psychology. She is especially interested in understanding how students learn and engage with statistical software. Alyssa has taught introductory and advanced undergraduate statistics, but most of her teaching is at the MA/PhD level with courses such as regression, multilevel modeling, structural equation modeling, or multivariate methods. She is the Chair of the Canadian Psychological Association's Teaching of Psychology section and a former Associate Editor for the Statistics Education Research Journal. In her spare time, Alyssa loves reading sci-fi novels and watching women's basketball.

Anna is a lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland.  Her research within data science and statistics education focuses on technology-based and technology-informed pedagogy, including but not limited to: large-scale teaching and assessment practices and tools; introduction of computer programming for data science and associated design principles for tool and task design; tool-mediated development of statistical concepts and reasoning, such as graphical and visual inference;  and frameworks for observable integrated statistical and computational thinking practices.

Letetia holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and an M.Phil. in Statistics from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus (UWI-STA). Currently, she is a Project Officer, providing Statistical Consulting on institutional data and has over a decade of experience lecturing Mathematics, Probability, and Statistics at the tertiary level. She previously coordinated the Mathematics Help Centre, assisting students with difficulties in quantitative courses and regularly engages in research and outreach. 

Letetia is a part of a Social Statistics Research Cluster at the Department of Behavioral Sciences, exploring research on Statistics Anxiety in students. She also lectures various courses including a Graduate Course in Advanced Statistics in Psychology and conducts workshops on statistical software using IBM SPSS and R. Her research interests encompass data-driven models for Higher Education, multidisciplinary applications of mathematical and statistical models for sustainability, and Statistics Education pedagogy. 

Letetia is also affiliated with the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and the American Statistical Association (ASA). As the first Women in Data Science (WiDS) Trinidad and Tobago Ambassador, she is closely involved in WiDS Worldwide through Stanford University, which highlights exceptional women in Data Science. Letetia is passionate about teaching, mentoring, and outreach and is dedicated to emphasising the importance of Mathematics and Statistics across various fields.

Click here to view Letetia's LinkedIn profile.

Fareena is currently an Instructor in Sociology at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. She teaches courses in introductory statistics, quantitative and qualitative research methods and health sociology. Fareena is also a PhD candidate in Sociology; her research focuses on food consumption patterns among adults in Trinidad and Tobago during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her interests include statistics education, health and illness, and nutritional sociology. 

Lazaros Gonidis has been involved with teaching methods and statistics in Higher Education for more than 10 years and is currently a Psychology Lecturer at the University of Sussex, lecturing psychological methods and statistics. He always had a keen interest in experimenting with gamification and other novel teaching methods, and is excited to see how Higher Education will respond to the expansion of AI. He has also researched how AI can affect people’s compliance and judgement, and is looking forward to building a network of scholars that will research the use of AI in teaching statistics and methods.

Chelsi Slotten holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from American University. Currently, she is a Product Manager for Sage Data, an educational platform that helps students and researchers find, explore, visualize, and share detailed data from trusted sources. She is interested in how to help students overcome statistical anxiety to engage more fully in data based research and decision making.  She is keen to understand what role AI can play in developing student confidence with data while understanding it's limitations.

Hilary Watt (expert medical statistics teaching fellow) develops innovative statistics teaching methods. Her passion is language and images that foster conceptual understanding, especially of p-values and of confidence intervals. She leads discussions (at conferences and beyond) on how best to interpret confidence intervals and p-values. She pays attention to common major misconceptions and poor standards in published statistical interpretations (“replicability crisis”), with resulting publications. She develops and trials teaching strategies designed to overcome poor standards/ fundamental misconceptions. She has publications in progress on the research collaboration that she leads, with data from medical statistics educators. She is author of Data Wrangling RECIPES in R online resource. She is medical researcher co-supervising fellowship/ students and awarded statistician NIHR funding to undertake randomised controlled trials.

Paul Hewson is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Exeter. He has a spent time working in local government, industry as well as academia.  This has left him interested in critical statistical reasoning and causality.  More recently, he has developed a keen interest in accessibility.

Helen is a Lecturer in Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Lancaster University. Her time is mainly split between researching novel statistical methodology for clinical trials, teaching statistics courses, and supervising statistics students with research projects. She has over a decade of experience teaching mathematics and statistics at a variety of levels to students from an array of disciplines, notably including as a Learning Developer for Mathematics and Statistics in the Management School. Her interests lie in statistics pedagogy for large cohorts, with a focus on facilitating inclusive and personalised learning.

Sarah Rhodes is a Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics at the University of Manchester. She teaches on a number of courses relating to Evidence Based Medicine and Biostatistics. As a former school Mathematics teacher, she is passionate about providing learning experiences that are active, accessible and challenging. Good research design, statistical literacy and critical appraisal are at the heart of her teaching.

Sarah is an active applied statistician with research interests in randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews.

Ioanna is a teaching-focused lecturer in Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. Her research interests include statistics education, with a particular focus on active learning, assessment and feedback practices and curriculum mapping. Ioanna has taught statistics modules to a wide range of audiences.

Paddy is a Senior Lecturer (Education) in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast. He is of mixed Zambian and Irish descent, and the first in his family to go university, which he completed as a mature student. His PhD research focused on the role of numerical and non-numerical ordering skills in early mathematical development. His is interested in statistics education research and Scholarship.

Margaret holds a PhD in mathematics, together with the  professional teaching qualifications PGCE (Mathematics), SEDA Certificate in HE Teaching and PGCert(University Teaching). She is a senior lecturer in medical statistics and researcher in education at Edinburgh Medical School. She has conceived and led 11 funded projects in medical education and statistics and supervised research staff and students through various spin-off projects. Margaret has published on an international scale in the fields of education, medicine, philosophy and statistical methodology. She has served as an invited speaker, chair and conference organiser at various local, national and international events relating to statistics, and learning and teaching in higher education. Currently, she serves as Vice Chair of the Teaching Statistics section of the RSS. Margaret is particularly passionate about communicating statistical rigour and soundness to trainee health professionals and uses clinically contextualised examples to highlight the potential impact of statistical misconceptions on clinical decision-making.

Amelia is a Research Assistant at the University of Sussex examining the effects of the 4 day working week on mental and physical wellbeing. Her research interests focus primarily on psychometrics and statistics education, with particular interest in the statistical aptitude and understanding of working psychology researchers. She is also a strong proponent of open science practices within psychology research. Her most recent research examines the extent to which specific residual plot characteristics (ratio, point density, degree of heteroscedasticity) affect how accurately psychology researchers can identify heteroscedasticity solely through residual plot interpretation (https://osf.io/yvr5n/).