James Stafford

Jamie Stafford joined the University of Toronto in 1999 as an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and became a full professor in 2005. He has held Visiting Professor positions at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He is a recipient of the Premier’s Research Excellence Award and recently received the Distinguished Service Award from the Statistical Society of Canada for his enthusiastic and dynamic leadership in statistical science across Canada — including serving as the Director of the National Program on Complex Data Structures.

His research focus is in asymptotics, symbolic computation and spatio-temporal methods. He recently developed a research program in spatial data analysis with a special emphasis on local smoothing methods applied to non-standard and complex data.

At U of T, Professor Stafford served as Associate, Acting and then Interim Chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine. He was Chair of the Department of Statistical Sciences from 2008 to 2018 and led the department through a remarkable period of expansion. He currently holds an appointment in the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

The Vice-Dean, Academic Operations is responsible for the development, implementation and ongoing monitoring of the Faculty’s interdivisional relationships and partnerships. This Vice-Dean has oversight of all interdivisional teaching agreements, including their financial management and their implications for the Strategic Mandate Agreement. In addition, the Vice-Dean, Academic Operations works closely with the CAO and the Executive Director of Faculty Budget, Planning & Finance Office to advise the Dean on financial matters. The other key facets of this portfolio include infrastructure technology, institutional research and data governance, and data science.