Faculty
Jeff Babb, Associate Professor
Office: 7L08 Phone: 786-9361 email
Jeff Babb joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in September of 2000 and served as its Chair for 2004-2009. Jeff is back from his 2009-2010 administrative leave, during which he was a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Statistics at the University of Manitoba. Jeff was Principal Consultant for the Statistical Advisory Service in the Department of Statistics at the University of Manitoba for 1998-2000. Prior to that he served as the Biometrician for the Grain Research Laboratory of the Canadian Grain Commission in Winnipeg for 16 years and, before that, was a Research Officer with Alberta Hospitals and Medical Care in Edmonton.
Jeff has extensive statistical consulting experience with industry, government and academia in the planning, design, implementation, analysis and reporting of scientific research projects and in the design and analysis of questionnaires and surveys. He has collaborated with anthropologists, chemists, biologists, climatologists, mathematicians, sociologists, nurses and educators. His research interests include spatial statistics, statistical climatology, simulation, game theory and the history of mathematics. He has taught a wide variety of statistical/mathematical courses at the Universities of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Alberta and at the Canadian Grain Commission. Jeff's hobbies include chess, reading, cycling and swimming.
Bob Bector, Instructor
Office: 6L21 Phone: 786-9227 email
Bob was born and raised in India. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Manitoba, and has taught at the University of Winnipeg since 1985. In recent years, he has been teaching Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Introduction to Statistical Analysis and Introduction to Survey Sampling.
James Currie, Professor and Dean of Science Research Profile Research Interests
Office: 3RC013 Phone: 786-9288 email
James Currie's main research focus is on formal language theory. Topics of his past publications have also included such odds and ends as graph colouring, ordered sets, number theory and the Simplex algorithm. James has a fondness for mathematical logic, foundations, and theoretical computer science.
Outside of Mathematics, James' interests include foreign languages, chess, music and sleight of hand.
In 2009, James Currie & Narad Rampersad, then Post-Doctoral Fellow at UW announced proof of Dejean's Conjecture.
Melody Ghahramani, Associate Professor Research Profile Research Interests (on leave)
Office: 6L25 Phone: 789-1414 email
Melody grew up in Winnipeg and obtained her Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Manitoba. She obtained her Master's and Ph.D. in statistics from Simon Fraser University and the University of Manitoba, respectively. Her research interests are in time series and biostatistics. She is interested in inference using estimating functions with applications in finance. Her applied research interest is in infectious disease modeling.
Shonda Gosselin, Assistant Professor
Office: 6L05 Phone: 786-9346 email
Shonda grew up in Winnipeg and completed her Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics at the University of Winnipeg. She received a Master of Mathematics degree in the Combinatorics and Optimization department at the University of Waterloo, and she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa in 2009. Her research is in the field of discrete mathematics, in the area of algebraic graph theory and combinatorics. She is particularly interested in the action of groups on graphs. Lately she has studied self-complementary hypergraphs, and the relationship between regular two-graphs and large sets of equiangular lines.
Shakhawat Hossain, Assistant Professor
Office: 6L22 Phone: 786-9492 email
Dr. Md Shakhawat Hossain received his Masters in Statistics from the University of Alberta in 2002 and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Windsor in 2008. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Alabama A & M University. Before then he completed Post-Doctoral Fellow (2008-2010) in the Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Alberta. Recently he joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Dr. Hossain has extensive experience in analyzing Canadian health administrative databases. His research interests include the following areas: 1). Statistical shrinkage models and variable selection via the James-Stein type shrinkage, LASSO, Adaptive LASSO, and SCAD methods, 2) Longitudinal studies, 3) Application of statistics in Health services Research.
Hatem A. Howlader, Professor Research Interests
Office: 6L03 Phone: 786-9347 email
Hatem Howlader has been with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics since 1981. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Manitoba, a Diploma in Statistics from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth as well as a B.Sc. (Hons) and an M.Sc., both in Statistics from the University of Dacca, Bangladesh. His research interest is Bayesian Statistical Inference including reliability and lifetesting. He is also interested in application of statistical methods to other disciplines, especially in Biology. He served ten years (1989-99) as Chair of the department. He has been an active member in a number of societies. In particular he has served the Statistical Association of Manitoba as president, vice-president and Newsletter editor. He spent his sabbatical in 1987-88 at the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, University of Umea, Sweden and in the Division of Mathematics and Statistics of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta. He spent his second leave (1994) at the New Mexico Tech, Socorro doing research and teaching a seminar course on Reliability and Quality Control. His recent leave (Jan-June, 2000) was spent as Visiting Scholar in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Informatics, Science & Technology, University of Western Sydney, Australia.
Sohail Khan, Instructor
Office: 6L23 Phone: 786-9388 email
Sohail Khan joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in 2009. He got his masters degree in Statistics from University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan and a masters degree in Statistics from University of Regina, Saskatchewan. Before joining University of Winnipeg, he has taught at University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Saint Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia and University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario.
W. Lee, Instructor email
Office: 6L25 Phone: 789-1414
Václav Linek, Professor Research Interests (on leave)
Office: 6L32 Phone: 786-9308 email
Václav's area of research is design theory, particularly coloring problems of Steiner systems. This research often leads to problems in hypergraph colorings, geometry and probability theory. He is also interested in number theory, analysis and computing.
His interests outside of mathematics include literature and mycology.
He is also the editor-in-chief of Crux Mathematicorum with Mathematical Mayhem, a publication of the Canadian Mathematical Society that's read around the world.
Ortrud R. Oellermann, Professor and Co-Chair Research Profile and Interests
Office: 6L04 Phone: 786-9367 email
Ortrud's main area of research is graph theory, particularly networks. She is interested in reliability of networks as well as optimal substructures, as for example Steiner trees in graphs.
N. Rampersad, Assistant Professor
Office: 7L06 Phone: 786-9882 email
Narad Rampersad was born in Ottawa, Ontario. He obtained a B.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. He did his graduate studies at the University of Waterloo, obtaining a MMath in Computer Science and subsequently a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He then did postdoctoral work at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Liege (Belgium). His research interests include combinatorics on words, automata theory, and numeration systems.
Anna Stokke, Associate Professor Research Profile Research Interests
Office: 6L26 Phone: 786-9059 email
Anna grew up in Manitoba and received a B.Sc. in mathematics from Brandon University and an M.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Manitoba. She completed a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Alberta in 2002. Anna's research area is in algebra, specifically combinatorial representation theory. She is interested in the representation theory of groups such as the general linear group.
In her spare time, Anna enjoys reading, hiking, and playing with her daughters.
Ross Stokke, Associate Professor Research Profile Research Interests
Office: 6L06 Phone: 786-9375 email
Ross grew up in Winnipeg, and obtained his degrees from the University of Manitoba and the University of Alberta. Ross's research is in the areas of abstract harmonic analysis and functional analysis. More specifically, he studies locally compact groups, their unitary representations, and a variety of associated Banach algebras. The nature of this branch of mathematics is both algebraic and analytic.
Terry Visentin, Professor and Co-Chair Research Interests
Office: 6L24 Phone: 786-9374 email
Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Terry Visentin went to the University of Waterloo for his post secondary education. There he majored in Statistics with Computer Science as an undergraduate and obtained an MMath degree in Combinatorics. He received his PhD in 1989 and has been at the University of Winnipeg since that time.
His main research interests lie in algebraic combinatorics with a specific interest in enumerative problems. In his work he uses algebraic techniques to solve difficult counting problems, but at the same time is also able to prove significant theorems in algebra by analyzing the structure of certain well-defined mathematical objects.
He also has a love of mathematical problem solving in general and coaches students representing this University in the Putnam mathematics competition.
Outside of mathematics, his interests include music and bridge.
Kalle Saari, Post-Doctoral Fellow
Office: 7L07 Phone: 786-9044 email
Kalle comes to the University of Winnipeg to work in collaboration with James Currie and Narad Rampersad for a year. Kalle got his Ph.D. from the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests include combinatorics on words and formal language theory.
