19 March 1948 – 16 March 2020
Born in Sydney, Susan (Sue) Wilson graduated from the University of Sydney in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree with First Class Honours. Her subsequent doctoral thesis at the Australian National University under the supervision of P.A.P. (Pat) Moran entitled Some Statistical Results in Genetics (1972) won the 1975 Peter William Stroud Prize. From these beginnings Sue’s early research interests spread into biostatistics, population health and bioinformatics – particularly the analysis and interpretation of large-scale genomic data that has become the basis of modern biology.
Following a lectureship at the University of Sheffield in 1972, Sue returned to ANU as Research Fellow within Pat Moran’s Department of Statistics, and by 1984 she was elevated to a Senior Fellowship.
Various joint appointments followed between 1988 and 1996 including working with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) and the Statistics Research Section in the School of Mathematical Sciences – later evolving into the group became the Statistical Science Program in the Centre for Mathematics and its Applications (CMA).
As a friend of AMSI Sue was a co-founder of the BioInfoSummer initiative from its launch in 2003 through to more recent presentations (2015) and in giving the opening lecture for 2018.
Her eminence as both a researcher and in promoting education saw her elevated to Professor Emeritus of Bioinformation Science and Statistical Science at ANU and appointment as an Honorary Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales in 2008.
Sue’s research collaborators included J.G. Oakeshott (measuring selection on drosophila populations), A. Thorne (physical anthropology), G.K. Ward (radiocarbon dating), J. Cavanaugh (mapping human disease susceptibility genes), P.J. Solomon (modelling and predicting the spread of AIDS in Australia) and C.J. Burden (Bioinformatics). She was ultimately published in over 200 peer-reviewed journals. Sue was also the Section Editor for Computation for the Encyclopedia of Biostatistics (Wiley, 1995-2004), and Editor for the theme Biometrics in the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (UNESCO, 2000-2007).
Honours bestowed upon Sue include: election as a Member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI, 1979), election as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA, 1991) and as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS, 1995). Sue was awarded the inaugural E. A. (Alf) Cornish Award by the Australasian Region of the International Biometric Society for her contributions to Biometrics (2011), and Honorary Life Membership of IBS ‘for outstanding contributions to the development and promotion of the discipline of Biometry’ in 2012. In 2017 Sue was made an inaugural Senior Fellow of the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society. She was the Editor of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Bulletin (1993-1997) and President of the International Biometric Society (1998-1999).
Beyond her commitment to AMSI’s annual BioInfoSummer Symposia, Sue was highly supportive of early career researchers, endowing a scholarship for honours students in mathematical biology in memory of her close friend and colleague Hilary Booth, and funding various travel awards to enabling undergraduate students to attend conferences in statistical science.
Australia has lost a highly respected and much-loved pioneer in the teaching and research of bioinformatics.
Sue is survived by her son Jonathan.
With thanks to Alan Welsh and Conrad Burden
