Laura Cowen

Dr. Laura Cowen is the associate dean research and a professor of statistics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Victoria. Trained as a field biologist, she did extensive remote field research on seabirds in British Columbia and Alaska. Laura obtained her MMath in Biostatistics from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Statistics from Simon Fraser University with a focus on ecological statistics, primarily working on developing models to estimate the population size of hidden populations. As an ecological statistician, her collaborative research has spanned both ecology and health, studying injection drug users, syphilis, seabirds, rock lobsters, and fish- anything hiding that needs counting. Laura has been president of the Western North American Region of the International Biometrics Society, Chair of the Statistical Society of Canada’s Caucus for Women in Statistics, and has been a member of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Action planning committee for the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute.