Staff, Students, and Associates

Dr Ian Hunt
Senior Statistician Specialising in Environment, Food and Agriculture

Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland
James Clerk Maxwell Building 
The King's Buildings (Edinburgh University) 
Peter Guthrie Tate Road 
EDINBURGH 
EH9 3FD 
Scotland, UK

Detailed Website:
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I have been a statistical consultant and researcher for over twenty years. My research has focused on applying statistics and probability theory to both physical and social sciences. As a consultant, I specialise in prediction error assessment, expressing uncertainty in plain language, and explaining statistical inference to scientific researchers and non-specialists.

I have technical expertise and consulting experience in the following areas: hypothesis testing and practical Bayesian inference; structuring and modelling of multivariate high-dimension data (such as microbiological analysis of soils); multi-year experimental design and ANOVA-style analysis; survey design and analysis; survival analysis and related testing; linear mixed models in pharmacology, psychology, agriculture and medical trials; and econometric time-series modelling.

Before joining BioSS in 2024, I worked at the University of Tasmania (senior lecturer, heading the statistics and data science service for the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture) , Monash University (lecturer, running a research consulting service with a team of five statisticians) and the Université Catholique de Lille (lecturer/course co-ordinator).

I have published work in leading peer-reviewed journals (high-impact titles from Elsevier, Springer, Springer Nature, the British Medical Journal and Oxford University Press) from a wide variety of disciplines, including agriculture, environmental science, law, statistics, economics, medicine and engineering.   And in the past five years, I have been a principal or co-principal investigator on seven major research grants (with a combined value of over three million USD).  I currently supervise five PhD students, though two are very close to finishing.

I am a Chartered Statistician (CStat) and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), and I also serve on the RSS committee for Statistics and the Law. I hold post-graduate degrees, with honours, from Université Catholique de Lille (France), the London School of Economics (London), City University (London) and Otago (New Zealand). I also have a post-graduate accreditation in statistics and data science from MIT (USA).