Benjamin Bolker

McMaster University

Short Course Title
Generalized Mixed Models: Basics and New Frontiers

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Short bio

Benjamin Bolker, PhD, is a professor in the departments of Mathematics & Statistics and Biology at McMaster University.

Professor Bolker has broad interests in computational statistics and population biology including mixed models, infectious disease dynamics, evolution of virulence, animal movement, and spatial population dynamics. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed publications (including one listed in the top 25 most-cited papers of the 21st century) as well the book Ecological Models and Data in R, which has been a gateway to advanced statistical modeling for many ecologists, and (with Dr. Marta Wayne) a Very Short Introduction to Infectious Disease (Oxford University Press) for general readers.

He is also well known for supporting researchers using mixed models and doing statistical analyses in ecology through his development and maintenance of widely used R packages (lme4, glmmTMB, bbmle), with millions of downloads and tens of thousands of literature citations, as well as answering questions in forums such as Stack Overflow. He directs the School of Computational Science and Engineering at McMaster and serves as associate chair (graduate) for Mathematics. He is a long-time associate editor for the leading ecology and evolution journal American Naturalist.