Dianne Cook is a Professor of Statistics in Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She holds a PhD in Statistics from Rutgers University. Her research focuses on statistical graphics, with an emphasis on interactive visualisation of high-dimensional data and statistical inference for data visualisation. At Monash, she teaches courses in machine learning and data analysis, and for the broader community leads workshops on data visualisation, reproducible research, and open source software.
Di is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Board Member of the R Foundation. She is a past editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and The R Journal, and author of numerous R packages. She is actively involved in R Ladies Melbourne, the Statistical Computing and Visualisation Section of the Statistical Society of Australia, and the Graphics and Computing Sections of the American Statistical Association.
In 2015, Di moved home to Australia after many years at Iowa State University. This allowed her to be close to family. As part of the move, she accepted emeritus status in order to continue supervising current students. She is far from retired, though, as you will see from publications, software, talks and student graduations.
Di is passionate about open source software, ethics and transparency, and achieving gender parity in society. She is also passionate about sports and the environment. Before becoming an academic she played sports competitively, with a highlight being the opening batswoman on Bob Hawke’s Prime Minister’s XI women’s cricket team against England in 1985, played an Manuka Oval in Canberra. The environment in Australia has changed dramatically in the years since colonisation with many species becoming endangered or even extinct. For this reason, many of the R packages originating from the NUMBATs group at Monash, of which Di is a member, are based on Australian wild life, many cute and wonderful creatures. And also, data sets compiled for teaching include many from the environment, and women’s sports statistics, along with details on how it was obtained.