About Shirley

Hi there I have worked at ISRU for 23 years in various consulting, teaching and managerial positions and since 2012 I have been the Principal Statistician. I consider myself to be a bit of a well-known international speaker (in some circles) and hold a visiting professorship in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I was previously a visiting professor in Wroclaw, Poland. ISRU is a self-financing business unit within the School of Maths and Stats. ISRU provides a service to business and industry dealing with any statistically related problems, helping clients to interpret the results and apply them to their world. These consulting services include contributions to Newcastle University impact case studies so vital in the recent University Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. I have several degrees from Newcastle University and before starting my more academic career I worked for several years in Hong Kong including lecturing at HKU and consulting in the financial sector. Amongst other European funded projects, I co-ordinated Newcastle University’s pro-ENBIS thematic network which helped establish the European Network of Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) as a bubbling hub of applied statistics and data mining. ENBIS was founded in 2000; I was a founding member and from 2004-5 I was ENBIS president during which time I chaired the ENBIS conference in Newcastle. More recently I was programme chair of ENBIS 12 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I am a keen contributor to the Royal Statistical Society (not least because I like to visit my friends in London) and have served on Council, as chair of the Quality Improvement Section and member of the Professional Development (and previously Affairs) Committee. In 2013 I co-chaired RSS 2013 in Newcastle, organised a joint seminar with Official Statisticians which showcased new ideas and opportunities with open data and gave an invited talk on data mining in utilities to the Business and Industry community. I like new communication techniques to spread knowledge and share information and ideas (especially webinars) and enjoy teaching especially unlocking the world of quantitative methods to a wider audience. I support statistical research to exploit the upsurge in data awareness and availability of massive collections of data in all sectors. Data mining has so much to offer; I co-authored a book entitled A Practical Guide to data mining for business and industry, to be published by Wiley in May 2014. The book focuses on sales and marketing applications and these ideas can also be appreciated in education and government where there is great potential.